Topic: System help needed from people smarter than me..

[Hexx]

HI all

OK over the last week my system has had power cut to it maybe 10 times while it was on. (They're working on hte power in our neighborhood)
(So the whole house lost power)
Anyway- don't know if that's a cause but it might be so..

The system (AMD something 2.14 Ghz, 1 Gig of Ram ) is
-taking a long time to boot up, it's about 8 minutes from the time I turn the power on until I can actually get anything (like IE) to open
- games are (almost) unplayable- DDO that used to take me a minute or two to load and set up takes about 6-7 minutes now
I can't get OP to run, it quites before it will load
- programs freeze all the time while running, even if I have 3 or 4 website tabs open things slow down alot.

I used to be able to run a game, while having 10 or so website tabs around without any problems or noticable slowdowns.

Now I have run both spybot and adaware, and they haven't found anything (although the adaware freezes up on the super detailed check)
I have run AVG free edition and it hasn't found anything/

I'm wondering -does anyone know of any places on the web that can run tests of a computer over the net to check the ram/motherboard etc?

I've had a bad experience traking a system in to be checked before, where I ended up replacing a MB and powersupply only to have a friedn boot them up fine later on and tell me all I likely needed was a new powercord. So I'm not really trusting taking it in somehwere unless I have some idea of where the problem might be.

Anyway- thanks in advance if anyone has any suggestions or know of any decent places that can do some kind of online scan.

[FCM_SFHQ_XC]

There used to be a really good website link in this forum that did an excellent job of scanning your computer.. I'll see if I can find it, in the meantime, have you run the standard Defrag and scandisk and coming up as OK?

[Hexx]

Defrag was done and worked fine.
Just tried scandisk (or whatver XP calls it)
Says windows cannot finish scanning the disk.

I'm betting that's a bad thing 

[FCM_SFHQ_XC]

http://www.pcpitstop.com/pcpitstop/default.asp

You dont need to create an acct for the test to be preformed.

And yea, usually when scandisk refuses to go, or finish, thats a bad harddrive sign.

[Hexx]

Perfect ! (well not perfect about the harddrive thing..but about finding something for me..err you know)

Thanks for the help!

[FCM_SFHQ_XC]

.. Im guessing the sudden power losses did something wierd with your harddrive, but I'll let the pcpitstop test decide whats wrong

[Hexx]

Apparently my uncached disk speeds are 20mb/s 6mb/s and 10mb/s across the 3 partitions.
Site says with my system they should be around 42 mb/s.
Seems to be the only thing the test found wrong.

So I'm thinking the HD is about to explode.

I'm guessing I have to burn a couple hundred gigs of data to CD's ove rthe next week 

Thanks again for the link though.
Very useful!

[Nemesis]

1/ Backup your data.  Check the burned CDs to ensure they are "good".

2/ Get a UPS.

3/ It may not be a corrupt HD but corrupt files.  Windows 2000 (and 98) has a tool called System File Checker (SFC.exe) that checks for file corruption.  Hopefully XP retains it or something that does the same.

4/ Once backed up reformat and reinstall.  (unless step 3 fixes things)

5/ If all else fails look at identifying failed components.  One way to do so would be to experiment with a "Linux Live CD" and see if things are stable, if they are then your HD is the issue.  A tool to check memory Memtest86.  The Ultimate Boot CD it includes Memtest and other tools.