Windows Explored

In the past week or so a couple workstations were brought to my attention in different offices that were exhibiting poor performance. Suspicious of disk bottlenecks, I remotely connected perfmon physical disk counters to both and saw a excessive time spent writing to the disk and the current disk queue length spiking when the workstations were logged on but idle. Here is a snapshot of both PCs:

Looking at the System event logs revealed numerous Errors with Source as disk and Event ID 7, otherwise known as bad blocks. On one of the problem workstations the print spooler kept on shutting down after starting it. If system files or program critical files are resident across these bad blocks on the disk, performance issues or otherwise abnormal behavior is bound to ensue. Run a Chkdsk to attempt to resolve.