Exceptionally high stop/start count

[Zack]

Have this not very used HP laptop that runs really slow. Is this stop/start count abnormal, and would it cause the laptop to go sloooowwww?

[hdsentinel]

In general, it is not too much for the hard disk (can be a bit high considering the relative small amount of power on time).

Alone this number does not cause slowness. Slowness may be more related to fragmentation of the volume and/or high number of software trying to read/write at the same time. Maybe high amount of TEMP files, small amount of RAM (resulting excessive swapfile use) and so - these can cause general slowness for any system, especially if installed on hard disk.

The high start/stop count is probably related to power management settings: if Windows configured to put the hard disk to sleep too often/frequently, then it can cause (many) 100's of start/stop cycles every day. I'd check that setting and adjust to prevent increasing of that number and extend the disk lifetime.

[Zack]

Power management was set to 3 minutes, I've changed it to 20 and it appears quicker and the stop/start count has only increased by 5 over the last 24 hours.
Thanks!