Help or ideas

[5PointOh]

I logged into AH last night and upped from a field and noticed my frame rates were in the 20s.  Not normal for my PC, I'm typically in 60s (except TT furballs were I'm at 55).  So I decided to do a restart of my PC. 

When I restarted my PC and it was seriously slow. It took 8 min to open to open the star menu.  It runs fine in safe mode, no error codes on start up. I had my odd 250 GB hard drive lying around, so I added it to my PC installed Vista on it (had a corrupt start up file and never messed with it since Microsoft said  "Install Windows 7 to repair your Vista issue".  Now I'm back up and running sort of. 

I went to run a disk check on the on the hard drive with the issue.  Of course my PC wont let me "says unable since drive is in use"  The HD with the issue is only a month old, is it possible its failing? 

Any ideas where to start?

[ImADot]

I run Spinrite on all new drives, and now-and-then on existing drives as maintenance.  It does some amazing things.  It will detect and repair small problems before they become big problems - even before the SMART thingy notifies you of a potential problem.  Look for it at GRC.com.