I'm at spring break so I'm back at my parent's house. I've turned my computer on which has been off since January and its unusably slow. This was not the case when I last used the computer in January.

It is running 10.04,

Memory: 875.5 MB CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+

Available Disk Space: 330.8 GB

I'm not seeing a large usage of either memory or Disk I/O.

If I look at my list of processes there is only a very small amount of CPU usage. However, if I hover over the CPU usage graph that I've on the top bar, I sometimes get really high readings like 100%.

It took a long time to boot, to open firefox, to open a link in firefox. As far as I can tell everything that the computer tries to do is just massively slow.

Right now, I'm apt-get dist-upgrading to install any updates that I will have missed since last time this computer was on.

Any ideas as to what is going on here?

UPDATE:

I thought to check dmesg and it has a lot of entries like this:

[ 1870.142201] ata3.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x7 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
[ 1870.142206] ata3.00: irq_stat 0x40000008
[ 1870.142210] ata3.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED
[ 1870.142217] ata3.00: cmd 60/08:10:c0:4a:65/00:00:03:00:00/40 tag 2 ncq 4096 in
[ 1870.142218]          res 41/40:00:c5:4a:65/00:00:03:00:00/40 Emask 0x409 (media error) <F>
[ 1870.142221] ata3.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
[ 1870.142223] ata3.00: error: { UNC }
[ 1870.143981] ata3.00: SB600 AHCI: limiting to 255 sectors per cmd
[ 1870.146758] ata3.00: SB600 AHCI: limiting to 255 sectors per cmd
[ 1870.146761] ata3.00: configured for UDMA/133
[ 1870.146777] ata3: EH complete
[ 1872.092269] ata3.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x7 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
[ 1872.092274] ata3.00: irq_stat 0x40000008
[ 1872.092278] ata3.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED
[ 1872.092285] ata3.00: cmd 60/08:00:c0:4a:65/00:00:03:00:00/40 tag 0 ncq 4096 in
[ 1872.092287]          res 41/40:00:c5:4a:65/00:00:03:00:00/40 Emask 0x409 (media error) <F>
[ 1872.092289] ata3.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
[ 1872.092292] ata3.00: error: { UNC }
[ 1872.094050] ata3.00: SB600 AHCI: limiting to 255 sectors per cmd
[ 1872.096795] ata3.00: SB600 AHCI: limiting to 255 sectors per cmd
[ 1872.096798] ata3.00: configured for UDMA/133
[ 1872.096814] ata3: EH complete
[ 1874.042279] ata3.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x7 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
[ 1874.042285] ata3.00: irq_stat 0x40000008
[ 1874.042289] ata3.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED
[ 1874.042296] ata3.00: cmd 60/08:10:c0:4a:65/00:00:03:00:00/40 tag 2 ncq 4096 in
[ 1874.042297]          res 41/40:00:c5:4a:65/00:00:03:00:00/40 Emask 0x409 (media error) <F>
[ 1874.042300] ata3.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
[ 1874.042302] ata3.00: error: { UNC }
[ 1874.044048] ata3.00: SB600 AHCI: limiting to 255 sectors per cmd
[ 1874.046837] ata3.00: SB600 AHCI: limiting to 255 sectors per cmd
[ 1874.046840] ata3.00: configured for UDMA/133
[ 1874.046861] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Unhandled sense code
[ 1874.046863] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
[ 1874.046867] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Sense Key : Medium Error [current] [descriptor]
[ 1874.046872] Descriptor sense data with sense descriptors (in hex):
[ 1874.046874]         72 03 11 04 00 00 00 0c 00 0a 80 00 00 00 00 00 
[ 1874.046883]         03 65 4a c5 
[ 1874.046886] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Add. Sense: Unrecovered read error - auto reallocate failed
[ 1874.046892] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 03 65 4a c0 00 00 08 00
[ 1874.046900] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 56969925
[ 1874.046920] ata3: EH complete

I'm not certain, but that looks like my problem may be a failing hard drive. But the drive is less then a year old, it really shouldn't be failing now...