Failed SMART Short Self Test

Question

My wife's laptop has had a couple issues. One day when trying to boot her laptop she signed in to her user name and the computer would get stuck. Windows would never load. Every time she tried to reboot this would happen. We finally had to create a new user name and transfer files to the new user name. Windows would load with the new user name. More recently, we found out that her hard drive failed a SMART Short Self Test that was run by Dell Support Center. When looking at the history, I found out that it had been failing that test on regularly scheduled tests since December 2010. It also fails the Targeted Read Test. According to some research it seems that failing the SMART test means that the hard drive is beginning to fail. The computer is out of warranty as of about 5 months ago. Another probably unrelated problem is that the wireless card is not performing well. We have to be fairly close to the router to browse the internet. If we get too far away the browser can't connect to the web. The funny thing is though that the wireless card icon still shows that it is getting a signal even though we can't browse. The wireless card problem is more of an inconvenience. Other than those things, the computer seems to function normally. My thought was to reformat and reinstall windows to see if that helps anything. Do you think we need a new hard drive for her computer? What are your thoughts? Any help would be great. Thanks!

theflash1932 · Answer

Agreed.  Most drives fail without warning ... be grateful you got a warning.

ieee488 · Answer

Do you think we need a new hard drive for her computer?   Yes.

Windows General

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