Explorer keeps crashing

for some reason everyone now and then explorer keeps crashing, and moving around the icons on home screen is really really laggy and slow. another thing is skyrim keeps crashing and when it does explorer does too and it just stops working and i have to restart it. could use some help here.

When this happened to me it was a symptom of my HDD beginning to die. Run some diagnostics on it and listen for the death clicks.

oh cmon, it cant be that, my hdd is less than 2 years old and this specifically happens a lot with skyrim. also my second hdd is only a couple of months old though i dont have windows installed on it or skyrim.

 

no death clicks either, is there any software i can use to detect damage or failure?

wait never mind, i do hear the clicks now. well i guess i need a new hdd and need to transfer all of my files.

HDDs can die after a lot less than 2 years. Their lifespan can vary widely from a few days to 10 years. It just depends on luck of the draw.

It happens more with Skyrim because you are reading large amounts of data at once of the drive that and the files may be stored in a bad sector.

I never said it was for sure your HDD but it was in my case.

are you brave enough?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5Y7BniaRXg

Macrorot Disk Partition Expert is free to home users and can be used to check for bad sectors or to copy a volume onto to a new disk. 

http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/macrorit_disk_partition_expert_home_edition.html

I recommend that you check your system and application logs with Event Viewer to see what warnings and errors are being recorded there.

You should also run MemTest86 to check your RAM isn't the cause and update your AV/Anti-Malware and run a scan just to play it safe.