StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I'm contracting out this problem as it is beyond my limited expertise, I'm hoping someone can at least tell me what the problem is and whether it can be solved.

My girlfriend recently accidentally filled up her entire harddrive to the brim, she managed to delete the stuff and she's got a good 5gb free, but the computer appears to be sufferring.

The harddrive says that it's FAT32, which I may be remembering in correctly, but I'm sure I remember XP windows not being FAT32, rather being the other one. It works very slow, won't let us defrag even though we have enough space and generally runs like molasses. I tried running a chkdsk on it, and it found errors but refused to fix them. It crashes for no apparent reason apparently, etc etc and won't save anything on applications. I don't really know what's going, but I think it might be related to the FAT32 thing.

Has anyone got any ideas or things we could try to narrow down the problem?

EDIT: Further info is that the harddrive has a partition, and one of them appears to be no longer formatted - keeps asking us if we want to format it.

FAT32 is the older file system used in the 9x line of Windows. XP still supports it, but it is missing features available in NTFS (the default XP FS). The biggest advantages to NTFS is the jurnaling system which prevents data corruption and loss (to an extent), lifting of limits like the 2GB max file size (interesting in this day and age of DVD images), a robust permission architecture, robust metadata architecture etc. The downside is slightly lower performance, but compared to the benefits its negligable.

You can convert your FAT32 partition to NTFS by using the convert command in the command prompt (Start->Run->cmd->"convert x: /fs:ntfs" where x is the partition you want converted, use without quotes). Be aware that there is a minor potential for data loss, altough I've never had problems with it.

I don't think this would solve all your problems. Some of those sound like spyware or dying hard drive, however NTFS is undoubtebly a better file system to use for a modern Windows PC, so I would recommend conversion (be aware of the above mentioned potential for data loss, if there are any unique pictures or documents that you need on the computer it is advisable to back them up), and it could potentialy solve (some of) the problems.

If you have "errors", probally means you have bad sectors on the HDD, even if you manage to fix them with a format. In time the bad sectors will spread and the HDD will be useless. Time to backup your data and get a new HDD.

Thanks for the help guys. We're going to get it checked over briefly by the university technical support guys just to reinforce what you've said- but it comes down to a decision over whether to spend 60 quid on a new harddrive, and then have to buy windows (as it came installed without the disk) and find an office equivalent - or whether it would be cheaper to just get a whole new machine as this one has seen better days.