After a few instances of overheating, my laptop has now slowed to a snails pace, and opening any program seems to bring the entire system to a stand still. I ran start up tests, and failed the Short DST test.
Failure ID: PU2P2M-5JT7AB-XD014J-60X803
Product ID: LF162UA#ABA
Error Log Description: Hard Disk 1
The other inquiries in the forum suggest this is likely a Hard Drive failure, but I figured I'd make sure.