Harddrive working slow

The strange, clicking noise is the sound of your hard drives read/write heads going to the home position, then going go a spot on the hard drive to read data, fails to read and then repeats the process again. The drive will continue this process until it successfully reads the data it needs or gives up. If succeeds eventually users will notice the odd noise and a decrease in computer performance, typically when reading or writing data to the hard drive. When it fails users typically get a *blue screen of death* or some type of hard drive read or write error. Can it be fixed? In this case perhaps but the first thing you need to do is immediately backup any data, Internet Explorer favorites, passwords, software activation keys or anything else of value stored on your hard drive. There is a very real possibility that the drive could fail altogether at some point so the sooner the better. How do you repair: As you have guessed the hard drive was physically damaged while the laptop was slammed shut. What probably happened was the read/write heads were slammed into the hard drive disks where the data is actually stored. More than likely there is -Click on Start, then Run. -In the Open field enter ?chkdsk /f /r? and click the OK button. -You will be prompted by and error that chkdsk cannot run but will ask if you want to schedule it to run the next time the system restarts. Enter ?Y? . -Restart your computer, -Chkdsk should run after your system reboots. It will check the integrity of your hard drive and ?repair? any spots on your hard drive it can?t read. Actually what it does is move the data in the spots it can?t read and then marks the spot so that Windows does not use them in the future. The process should take a couple of hours, depending on how much information is stored on it. If you?re lucky this will give your hard drive a new lease on life. Keep an eye on your hard drive as time goes on, its possible that the hard drive could develop more issues as time goes on. If you see little improvement then your read/write heads may have been damaged as well and you?re best off replacing your hard drive. If you go this route let us know since you can use a generic laptop hard drive rather than purchase an overpriced Dell replacement. If you have any other questions let us know and please don?t forget to rate this posting.

Sounds to me as if the hard drive got physically damaged. If you haven't done so yet, back up your data right away. Go to support.dell.com and see if the hard drive is something you can replace - I would strongly suggest that if you are going to replace it yourself, you get a replacement from Dell. But I suspect you will have to take it to a shop for repair.