Toshiba Laptop fail

I have a Toshiba Satellite C655-55068, bought 9/2010.
It came with Win 7. I made recovery disks when I bought it before installing anything.

I use CCleaner, I have anti-virus (Trend Micro)
I normally shut down when I'm not using it; sometimes it is off for a couple of days.

For the last two weeks, it's been getting slower and slower. It takes about 5 minutes now to boot up and open windows. Too many browser windows will really bog it down - there's 4 G memory.

Yesterday I shut down and restarted - it will do the POST test but refuses to load windows.

Questions: Is it possible the hard drive is bad? Toshiba has a replacement for $60
Should I just replace the HD without getting the motherboard tested? I can do this myself

I have the recovery disks and I just bought Idrive and backed up everything on the HD so I'm not that concerned with recovery.

Thanks for your help.

Carol

 

David,

Thanks for the advice. I couldn't boot into safe mode, windows wouldn't boot at all but I could get into the BIOS, that's why I suspected the hard drive. After I posted I realized that if the motherboard was bad, I wouldn't even get to the BIOS. (Palm to forehead).

I ordered a replacement HD from Toshiba ($60), installed it and since I'm a good little geek and made recovery disks when I first bought the thing, I'm installing them right now.

Fortunately I just bought iDrive 2 weeks ago and ran a complete backup. Yay.

It's nice when things go right for a change even after they fail. Many lessons in Should Have Done over the years I've been messing around with 'puters.

Thank you again for your reply.