Please help,
I have a 2010 Macbook pro with 250hd and 4g ram and parallels. I bought it new and never had it opened up. It would perform great and boot in 30 seconds. I used it once or twice a week for 2 hours at a time usually plugged in. I had one gray screen crash 10 months ago that I was told was related to a flash drive, zapping the pram solved this problem. Once with a windows update it froze and I had to power it down with the button. Then I noticed it getting slow to boot, 45 to 90 seconds. I zapped the pram and did disc repair and it was better again. But now it spins the beach ball on the simplest of tasks. The strangest thing happening now is that when I tried to repair the hard drive from CD, the hard drive may or may not appear on the disks list. This last time the hard drive finished repairing and then disappeared from the list. I do the common fixes and when I think it will work for a while, then it acts up again. I never used Time Machine before but I don't know if that is an option now.
My assumptions:
Software problem related to Windows software?
Bad hard drive cable? But it has never been opened and didn't start problem for over a year.
Failing hard drive? But it is not used often and never dropped.
Any help is appreciated. Thanks.
I have a 2010 Macbook pro with 250hd and 4g ram and parallels. I bought it new and never had it opened up. It would perform great and boot in 30 seconds. I used it once or twice a week for 2 hours at a time usually plugged in. I had one gray screen crash 10 months ago that I was told was related to a flash drive, zapping the pram solved this problem. Once with a windows update it froze and I had to power it down with the button. Then I noticed it getting slow to boot, 45 to 90 seconds. I zapped the pram and did disc repair and it was better again. But now it spins the beach ball on the simplest of tasks. The strangest thing happening now is that when I tried to repair the hard drive from CD, the hard drive may or may not appear on the disks list. This last time the hard drive finished repairing and then disappeared from the list. I do the common fixes and when I think it will work for a while, then it acts up again. I never used Time Machine before but I don't know if that is an option now.
My assumptions:
Software problem related to Windows software?
Bad hard drive cable? But it has never been opened and didn't start problem for over a year.
Failing hard drive? But it is not used often and never dropped.
Any help is appreciated. Thanks.