SO's laptop has been having a few issues with working recently. I have a Ubuntu live CD in the drive which works. It did have Vista on the HD which i changed to 7 last week in an attempt to see if that helped.

I can get it to load the OS every time. But if i try and load photo's it seems to have an issue using either the installed OS's or the live CD. the machine will always stall. Using the Ubuntu to copy the files off at moment which seems to be working, sort of.

I can get so many photos to copy to the enternal drive then the transfer seems to stall for 5-10 seconds, maybe 30 seconds, completely random time, then it will start up again. A couple of files also seem to be corrupted?

I suspect the HD is about to pack up hence trying to make sure the data is backed up. I am right in my guess or could there be something else that would give these symptoms?

Basically if i go and buy a new HD will that solve the issue or is the Motherboard dying in which case might as well get a new laptop.

sounds like either memory or HD.

yes it could be many other things including a cable failure, motherboard failure (hence dma errors)

hd by far the most most likely though 🙁

Run a disk check in Windows and a memory check using the memory checker on the ubuntu live cd.