well, it doesnt, really... it just has a lot of delayed write errors and the hd makes a lot of unnatural clicking noises and for a 1.0ghz processor it moves a lot slower than it should... so what should i do? (its a dell inspirion 8100, btw)... 1.) get a new HD? 2.) get more ram? 3.) new processor unit thingy? 4.) new puter...
that sounds like a bad hard drive to me. i would call dell and explain the problem. they may offer to swap the hard drive on the cheap. however, the absolute first thing you should do is make a copy of the files you want to keep. floppy, cd-rw, web, etc.