Is my hard drive dying?

[jmk909er]

Hi, I have a Toshiba Laptop Satellite P744 for about 3 years now, with windows 7. I keep having this recurring situation when I login. It does not happen all the time but seems to be increasing in frequency. Here is what happens:

When I login the bottom task bar is no longer translucent, the start menu and explorer windows are all different, not translucent. It looks to me more like XP.

Shortly after starting I get an error balloon pop up from the task bar saying: "Failed to connect to a windows service, windows could not connect to the system event notification service...etc" I have a screenshot of the entire message.

Then I get another error message pop up saying: "NT Kernal System has changed since the last time you used it"

Sometimes if I restart it will start properly again in windows 7 but not all the time and sometimes I have to do a system restore to get it back and this is happening more and more. Does this mean my hard drive is dying? Is it time to replace it? I am a pretty heavy user and it runs almost all the time but I really don't know what this means.

I am placing this link to screenshots I took of all the errors:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/r8wzb4sbd...ko-CX4eYa?dl=0

Here is a link to all my computer specs: http://speccy.piriform.com/results/n...MWcuRIO8IFYnG2

 

[RolandJS]

Have you made full-partition backups of your OS and data partitions to an external source? You might want to make a couple of images each, then get ready for the regulars, seasoned techs, to give you detailed advice. I'm simply a newbie here.

 

[jmk909er]

I did make recovery media a couple of weeks ago and saved on a thumbdrive

 

[kyHAS]

Check this real quick. Bring up a run command. Hold <R> and windows logo same time. Type <systempropertiesperformance> and hit enter. Make sure <adjust for performance> isn't checked, this will rid of the translucent windows. Seems like a pickle to me, I'm a noobie here as well, but I can recommend you to initialize <sfc /scannow> from a command prompt. This will replace any OS files missing and prompt you if any has been fixed.

 

[kyHAS]

Sorry I also meant to say, make sure <adjust for appearance> is checked. This will and should give you back your translucent windows.

 

[jmk909er]

Thanks, It is not erroring out right now but when it does I will try it

 

[RolandJS]

Tweaking.com's Windows Repair (All in One) can be downloaded or sneaker-netted from another computer; run it, accept default checkmarked items, add #s 26 & 27. This has cleaned up and fixed up my Windows quite well from time to time.