i've been using utorrent for years leaving it on all night

If no hardware changes, disk might be going bad or ram. Memtest ram to make sure it's not that and get it out of the way.

How old are your drives? mainly OS drive and other drive if your saving your stuff to another drive.

try this also...
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-hardware/service-control-manager-errorevent-7206-arcctrl/73c3ecdb-9e53-4add-918a-3e2887bc4243?auth=1

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if it still starts up, get a new drive (same size or bigger than working one) and put it on the 2nd sata connector (and make sure bios sees it), image the old hdd to new hdd, remove old hdd, move new drive to connecter where old drive was.
i it doesn't startup anymore, you'll need to reinstall everything.

i use this

>>164971
first thanks for the response

hmm, my OS drive is quite old - can't even remember when I bought it! ok I'll do memtest first, and then run chkdsk and see what happens.

what I should really do is just buy a new hard drive!

>>164974

A new drive wouldn't hurt, especially if you DON'T have a SSD already to put your OS on.

Also uninstall anything you don't want and maybe a registry scan even though stuff like can be risky but a lot of times when a pc gets clogged that's the only option. I personally keep a ghost image to restore to and am about to do one in a couple minutes.

>>164980
is an SSD absolutely necessary? my computer isn't quite state of the art. seems like overkill. also, I've heard registry scans are not advised? but I guess I don't have anything installed a really care about that much anyway

>>164990

No, Not absolutely necessary, but a good investment. If you're perfectly satisfied with the speed of your PC then disregard, but a lot of people would appreciate a nice speed boost. Also, yeah registry scan can possibly lead to unexpected consequences and make things worse so you might be better off leaving that for last. That's an option for if you are still stuck with this problem and have no choice between bad and worse.

>>164973
wait a minute...is this one of those programs that comes with a bunch of viruses?

>>164991
hmmm, i do want to run some demanding games, an ssd will definitely help with that - problem is they're over twice the price of a normal hd, but as you said they are a good investment

do ssd's have none of the usual problems normal hd's have?

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>>164993

Not him but Macrium is a reputable backup program. I suggest AOMEI backupper. That's what I use even though it's actually less popular from what I can tell but it's treated me so good for my backups. Here's a screenshot.

>>164995

Well, games is one of the things SSD's don't help with very much. You won't see a performance increase over if you were to install a game on your normal HDD. You would see a performance increase in normal all around things like boot up time, opening and closing programs, copying and pasting files.

As far as I know SSD's don't become fragmented and you're not supposed to defragment them and I think they last longer.

>>165001
>SSD's don't become fragmented
SSDs have no seek latency, but they still read and write faster if you make large, linear requests. Which is less likely to happen if your filesystem is fragmented.
>and you're not supposed to defragment them
This is because it wears the flash cells out. But fragmentation does reduce SSD performance, for both reads and writes.
>and I think they last longer.
Wrong. They have a write endurance that's 1000-10000 times shorter than a hard disk, which is why you shouldn't defrag them all the time.

op here, back from work - so what's my best course of action? my current OS HDD is an old WD 500gb - should I buy a 1tb? is there a benefit to having a larger HD to install your OS on?

of course I should run memtest and chkdsk first though...

well it did it again, this time I was only running virus scan (a full system scan)

*in leeloo voice* PLEEZ HAALP

>>165554
> I was only running virus scan
of course its gonna hang and die. its running through the files on the hdd.