My PC died all of a sudden Thursday morning. I’d boot and it would basically start crawling at the desktop meaning it would get to the desktop relatively quickly but once there it could take 5 to 20 minutes to get anything running. I thought it might be a virus but no, that’s not it
I tried System Restore, no luck. Some things led me to believe it might be my system hard drive because there was at least one time I got to window where I could see my folders and checking the system drive was slow but checking my other two drives were fast. The problem with that explaination is the machine worked fine while booting and also in safe mode.
A friend suggested chkdsk/defrag but no luck there. So, I decided finally to reinstall XP though still thinking it’s a hardware problem. If I re-installed and it still went slow then I’d know the hardware was busted.
Well, I couldn’t get it to install. First it couldn’t read my XP CD. I thought that meant the CD was scratched and putting it in another CD drive seemed to confirm that. In either case it didn’t immediately get an error, it got about 70% in to installing and then bombed out on about 5 files, all screensavers.
I skipped those files and after it finished, while it was doing it’s first reboot I decided to try to copy the CD using my external notebook CD drive that I haven’t touched in 2 years. It took me 20 minutes just to find the power supply. Anyway, it didn’t have any trouble reading the CD so I made a copy, during which my main machine was waiting for the CD. I popped in the copy and after a few minutes the main machine complained again. I suppose the copy could be bad but I suspect that really means something more serious is wrong with my main machine.
If everything is slowly breaking that’s a sign of a bad power supply but still, it sucks. If I go get a new power supply and that doesn’t fix it do I then go get a new root hard drive? do I instead get a new motherboard? Maybe by some random bad luck both the main hard drive and both CD drives died, not likely I guess.
It sucks when your computer breaks. There went my weekend and my money 
Maybe there is something wrong with the motherboard…are the CD/DVD drive and the “bad” hard drive connected to the same IDE header? Or could it be a bad IDE cable? Just a thought.
(Maybe do a memory check as well?)
sounds strange. im a computer systems engineer, maybe i can help. the first thing i would ask is if your CD/DVD/whatever drive is plugged into the same channel as your root hard drive. What im thinking is that possibly your drive has gone bad at a certain point. The system install works untill 70% and then cant read/write and fails. if your cd is running on the same channel then it can (rare, but ive seen it happen) experience issues also. This would explain why windows ran slow also. The system was trying to write to the swap file and couldnt get good read/write and so your system slowed down to nothing. Try a different hard drive if you have one. Sometimes power supply can waste hard drives but ive only seen it 2 times in 15 years. Good luck!
Sorry about your computer…it is amazing how reliant we have become on these things. I remember when I was a kid, the only computer type thing we had in the house was a pong-console, followed by our hi-tech atari.
My computer died last year…and all communication came to a screeching hault. I could not wait to get back into the swing of things.
I hope you figure it out soon. Until then, you could always read a book!
If you suspect the power supply, then I suggest you do not hesitate too long to replace it. I had one that for whatever reason, I had to sometimes power on and off a few times before it would “kick in”. Eventually, I turned the power on and nothing happened. Then I smelled something nasty and burnt-like. Obviously, burnt out power supply.
So I took my system in to the store I bought it from (usually I build my own PC, but this time I just chose all the parts and had the store build it). So they replaced the power supply and turned the power on… Hard drive not detected. Uh OH. Turns out the harddrive got FRIED when the power supply blew. It cost me $500 at a data recovery service to get all my data off that dead drive.
Avoid the pain now, and either back up everything on your drives, or go change that power supply. Also, power up with the new power supply without having your drives connected, as a precaution. Just to make sure it’s “ok”.
Perhaps it’s just simply Windows breaking out of spite ? My friend had similar problems with his computer, turns out that nothing was wrong with the hardware. Perhaps you should consider Linux or even FreeBSD as your alternative operating system ?
sorry but you do sound like an open source linux ____ because you’re clearly reaching for straws to try to find the fault with Windows.
Last Friday the machine wouldn’t even start if pushed the power button. How Windows would be responsible for that is beyond me. Plus, not being able to read the CD is not a Windows problem as well. And, by the way, sitting right next to my main machine is a Linux box which also broke in a similar manner about 6 months ago but as I didn’t *really* need linux I haven’t bothered to fix it yet.
Anyway, monday I put a big honken 550w Antec True Power power supply in it. I hope that was the problem. If it breaks now then I have to get a new MB, Memory and CPU which will be about $600
Ok, ok. Could be ACPI problem also
I’ve had that one when a broken ACPI driver was being used and my computer wouldn’t turn on unless I did a hard reset (unpluged the cable from it for about a minute). Also, as I said, some CDs are just busted (are you using an original copy or a ‘backup’) ? Could it be that your apartment has some bad power cabling ?
I didn’t think about unplugging it for a while. That’s a good idea. I did unplug it but plugged it right back in.
As for the CD, assuming it was the power supply, I unplugged 2 hard drives (leaving only the boot drive) and tried re-installing and this time I had no problem reading the CD.
Once it was done installing I plugged the 2 HDs back in and everything *seemed* to be working again. Then, a day or two later I had the episode were it wouldn’t even turn on. I opened the box and thought maybe I would try testing the power supply or looking to see if a fuse blew but I didn’t know how to test it. Since the MB turns on the power supply only a couple of leads actually have power. I tried to find out how to get it to come on and/or how to test it looking on the net but I didn’t find anything. Plus, if it was the power supply I’d probably have to put a load on it before I’d see it was not doing it’s job.
Anyway, like I said, my solution was to just get a new power supply and pray :-p Maybe I should look into a brown out tester or an UPS to test the power coming out of the wall.
It sounds like you’re trying to use the power supply with too many things ? How many watts does your power supply provide ? When you said that when you unplugged the two HDs, you CD-ROM was working fine. Try unplugging only one HD and see what happens.
The new powersupply I put in is a 550watt one which is the biggest one they had. I’m not sure what the old one was off the top of my head except it came with a pretty nice case I got and so I assumed, maybe wrongly, that it should be fine.
The case I have is something like this.
Assuming the old power supply is fine and it just had one too many HDs on it I’ll try it in another computer that I think has bad power as well as hasn’t worked for 6 months. If it works there then maybe you are right