Computer started freezing really badly this weekend, HDD possibly about to die? Need urgent help

Hey, first time posting here, hoped I would never have to make a request but looks like time has come for me. I hope you can help me!

General specs (can go into more detail if needed):

Nvidia GTX650

AMD FX 6300 six-core

8GB DDR3

Seagate 2TB HDD

Note: I luckily already managed to secure the files I need, it weren't many. My problem is finding out what is causing it and how to fix it

Since I literally have no clue what's going on I'll just try my best to describe my symptoms and follow up with information if needed:

Bought a prebuilt computer in Dec 2013 and never had a problem with it, however now it seems to have completely died on me. I have been experiencing slight FPS lags over the recent weeks but I brushed it off as being the fault of the games I was playing or just Windows being weird. In the last week these FPS drops have developed to straight up 5-20 second freezes in games. Even my Windows Toolbar sometimes freezed for a bit, or when I was listening to music with the media player it would sometimes cut off for some seconds before resuming. This all started at around the same time.

Anyway, I started having these really large freezes last week and now finally on the weekend, after I restarted my PC, it legit freezes on EVERY input I make on the computer. For up to minutes. It takes like 5 minutes for the Microsoft Security Essentials to open and my Toolbar just freezes constantly. I don't even try to open any sort of program at this point, only Mozilla seems to somewhat work. It takes me a while to navigate around but for example YT videos seem to work fine once I'm on the page. I got a blue screen yesterday though while watching a video, where it told me to just restart if it happens once and check recently installed hardware and possibly remove it if I remember correctly.

Another thing, when I start my computer I now get this message at startup saying my SATA port where I think my HDD is connected: "SMART capable, but command failed" I need to press F1 to continue.

I used HDD Health to check my hard drive, but I don't think it's working since temperature is on N/A and other things too, it only really shows the specs. I also checked Windows Event Viewer where it showed one critical event with my Kernel (Event ID 41) and several disk errors (literally like 800, Event ID 7).

So yeah I hope off of this information someone can tell me what's going on, I suspect my HDD is about to die but I have no clue honestly...

I'm planning on doing the following things once I get home today in the hope it will work:

1. Clean my Computer, maybe dust can cause this?

2. Reset Windows to previous state, I think I installed drivers lately but I don't know if it's related

3. Reinstall windows entirely after wiping the HDD

4. Just saw Seagate has a tool for their HDDs, maybe try that and hope it'll be able to read temp etc.

5. If all else fails - just buy a new HDD I guess and hope that that's what's actually broken

Please tell me what you think of those options, should I try them and what else do you think I should do? I rely heavily on using my computer so I pretty much need to get this fixed ASAP

Submitted December 12, 2017 at 01:35PM by Alosar http://ift.tt/2B7WrSC