I've reset it through Windows 8's startup troubleshooting, but the nagging feeling that it's a hardware problem-that is, the hard drive is going to die any second now-makes me want to invest as little time troubleshooting this further as possible.

Recently, my family's computer has been on the fritz-even if it manages to boot into Windows, it's impossible to launch any program or even get to the command prompt. For about $5 a month, you can rest assured that even if your hard drive drops dead or your home burns down (your computer within it), your files, settings, photos, and other important data are saved. The first thing to have in place, then, is an automated offsite (online) backup service like CrashPlan and Backblaze. You can generally consider your computer's drive reliable, but it's really like playing the lottery and hoping your drive isn't one of those that ends up with disk errors that make your data inaccessible before you had a chance to back those files up. Hard drives fail, and they fail often, with 22% of hard drives failing in their first four years of usage.

Hard disk checker