Hard drive problems continue..on my own PC this time. About a week ago I noticed my computer suddenly became very sluggish, locking for several seconds at a time. So I went around looking in the device manager when I saw my primary hard drive was running in PIO mode. Sweet! I thought, how did that happen. After some Googling I found that Windows automatically puts a drive in PIO mode if there are too many errors. Indeed, the System Event log showed a few "bad block" errors. Ran scan disk, it fixed a few things, and I reinstalled the IDE controller so it would go to Ultra DMA mode again. Problem fixed I had thought, but yesterday the problems came back (see image). And this Maxtor drive is maybe two years old, at best. They just don't make hardware like they used to..

Movie: A little gasoline, blowtorch ... no problem.