Dead PC!

2004-01-23

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 😞

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