Dell Inspiron 8100 Hard Drive Bad?

My church has a Dell Inspiron 8100 that it uses only for the lyrics to the praise and worship songs on the overhead, via PowerPoint. It never goes online.
It used to by it's previous owner, but it was given to us and I cleaned all spy/mal/ad-ware out of it and virus checked it.

It was running great until one day when they called me frantically saying it wouldnt boot up.
So I brought it home and sure enough, 2 hours it took to boot up and another 20 mins or so to open each program, or Windows Explorer, etc.

Finally as the night wore on, and it got hot, it ran great. I thought that by emptying all of the junk out of it, that's what fixed it. Booted, rebooted, opened a bunch of programs (at the same time) and it ran great.

Shut down, went to bed.....
the next morning I tried to boot up.... again with the 2 hours.
It was about 4 hours before it was running smoothly
PLUS, it's beginning to click loudly.

I copied all of the powerpoint presentations to my flash drive for safe keeping and I'm thinking I need to replace the hard drive.

Dell wants $180 so before I tell them that's what they need, I wanted to make sure that's what they needed......
so I came HERE !!!

You guys know EVERYTHING !!!!
help???


Linda

 

If it is the hard drive clicking it is going out, but 180 is to high for a hard drive you can find them at your local retailer with pretty good rebate offers, need to find out from Dell if you replace it yourself if you can use their system restore disk to reinstall OS, i think the only way they won't let you use the disk if the motherbord has changed,better to find out for sure