Possible Hardware Issue

Ok first things first, I'm new to the forum so if a Mod thinks this thread is best placed elsewhere then move away

I'm running Windows 8 on this Sony Vaio laptop.

My problems first started a couple of weeks ago, out of no where the laptop starting taking ages to do simple tasks (opening folders, webpages etc.) which it had previously be doing no problem. I tried to do a System Restore but it told me it wasn't possible and both CHKDSK and scannow were returning errors that they were unable to fix. And so I thought that the Windows installation had become corrupted somehow and so I did a complete System Recovery.

I did the recovery but noticed that when I looked at my advanced System Information it was telling me that I only had 256 MB of Graphics Memory as opposed to the 4GB I knew I had and it was running games sluggishly that would previously have been perfect. No amount of troubleshooting and AMD drivers updates would solve the problem and so having not put anything back on the laptop yet I did another recovery.

On the next one everything was running smoothly for around a week or so until I began having problems again. I noticed Windows hadn't assigned the recovery partitions a drive letter and Disk management wouldn't give the option to do so either despite being able to see them. I downloaded Partition Magic and used that to assign drive letters (could this have caused the issues if the registry had already pointed certain processes to these drives unlettered? I did not change the main C: drive letter).

It was fine for another day or two until the laptop wouldn't boot completely every time, and when it did, things like the audio drivers and stuff would appear as not detected and so I'd have no sound, CHKDSK and scannow both returned errors they couldn't fix again. System Protection told me I had no restore points created even though I knew I had created several manually (I was creating them after every little update/program install by this stage).

There were also a number of various BSOD errors returned when I was trying to get the laptop working like 'Memory_Dump', 'Memory_management', 'Kernal_Data_Inpage_Error', and I'd receive error popups like 'The memory could not be read at....'. There were others too that I have written down and will add to the thread later. And so I backed up my data and another recovery was carried out (I should point out I really need to use this laptop for work hence not being able to give up straight away and leave it in to be fixed).

Things were going well for the last 10 days or so until it has now started to do things a little sluggishly at times again.

-CHKDSK /C: is not returning any errors but it gets to 65% of stage 2 with ~60000 index entries left and it jumps on to stage 3 which literally finishes instantaneously so I'm not sure how thorough it is testing.
-Third party software like HDTUNE after a long error test says there are some bad sectors and even recognises some in it's realtime drive health feature. Western Digital Diagnostic tool passes the drive on a quick test (haven't had a chance to do a long one as this will take several hours.
-SFC /SCANNOW gets to 63% then stops and says it has found errors it can't fix.
-DISM/..../SCANHEALTH says there are errors it can fix.
-It passes anti-virus and malware scans

And now to the main crux of the matter, I have no doubt another recovery will have things running smoothly again but are my chronic problems indicative more of a hardware part that is failing and if so is it possible to say with any degree of certainty which one? This is of particular interest as the warranty on the laptop runs out on Dec 1st and so time is winding down fast . I'm not sure which error logs to attach as I've built up quite a few by now so if someone could tell me which are needed I'll happily attach but unfortunately I don't have any of the ones pre-system recovery.

Many many thanks to anyone that can help me solve this as I'm really trying to avoid a possible hefty repair fee and sorry for the long winded story.

Speccy Snapshot

By all means if your warranty runs out Dec 1 RMA the sucker sounds like a hardware issue to me, Your GPU would be suspect, and your hard drive also could be failing. You can test your hard drive with testing hardware supplied by the manufacture. I use HD Tune that I paid for! However All the Hard Drive manufactures have a testing program to download for free. 3DMark11 will test your GPU its mostly for Gaming GPU so you may have a hard time finding comparisons.
Another program Hwinfo64 will give you all the information about your hardware including Load and Temps. If Hwinfo64 shows your GPU with reduced RAM that would be your problem a failing GPU

I should also add that on the Windows Update page in the Control Panel it claims that it has never been updated, this simply isn't true. It does not return errors when I ask it to check for updates however it has not found updates other than for Windows Defender in the last week or so at least and I would speculate that there should have been updates in that period.

I've attached the SF Diagnostic Tool Files.

Just another update, I ran a memory test using memtest and it checked out ok.

Anyone have anything to add?

Please run these free hardware diagnostics: Hardware Diagnostics. Let us know the results and we can move on from there.

I suspect a hard drive problem - so start with that, but run all the tests.
If it's hardware, get it to the service center immediately (before your warranty runs out).