Obviously this thing is pretty bad and i have ordered a replacement that should be here tomorrow but will it be any faster? Is the general health and massive amount of dead sectors the problem or is it something else?
yeah that drive is most probably on its last legs and will fail any time now. I would recommend only using it to gather any data on it you need and back it up, but even then only as a secondary drive.
its hard to tell if this is the culprit in your system woes at a cursory glance however, but it does seem a likely culprit. Swap it out and see. As your hard drive gets closer to death the read times often become exponentially longer, so it is a safe bet you will see a massive performance increase as soon as you swap it out.
Cheers mate, i'm going to put all the important stuff over onto the new drive then reinstall windows. I may report back with my findings but i'm pretty sure at this point that this drive is the culprit.
no worries dude. Although in your situation (can't tell you how many hard drives I have been through at this point) I would install windows straight to the new drive and then start copying data off the old one after, this way if the drive starts failing you shouldn't have too much trouble and may avoid some headache.
Yeah i have no idea how it got that bad, i 'borrowed' it out of my flatmates external that he never uses...you have no idea how bad this thing is at running anything.