HDD freezes PC, what's going on?
Okay, so this first happened two months ago, and I didn't bother because I know that something might have caused my PC to stop responding. After rebooting, everything worked fine. But unfortunately, the problem persisted.
The problem is probably my hard drive. The PC works fine, and all of a sudden the HDD makes a weird sound and everything stops responding, and sometimes the computer will restart after 2-3 minutes. I've noticed that this scenario occurs while I'm not doing anything on computer for a while. When I play games, listen to music and chat with people everything works fine.
But lately, these random crashes are happening more often. The computer stopped 3 times today! This is really frustrating because I use a program called Virtual Router to share the internet connection with my iPhone, and I got really tired of re-sending a message on Facebook because the PC randomly decided to take a break.
Both hard drives are frequently defragmented and cleaned. The one causing all the trouble is the primary drive which has Windows on it. I often clean the registry with CCleaner and scan for malware with AVG Internet Security.
I have Asus P5K mobo and Windows 8.1.
So, is my hard drive failing? Purchasing a new drive is not an option, because I'm 15 and my parents hate computers so I can't ask them to give me money for that… Any other solution is appreciated.