Computer problem, not sure where to start

Soldato
Joined
20 Mar 2004
Posts
4,607
My computers not had the best track record and lately it's been getting worse.

The main problem is start ups, in the mornings it can take anywhere between 5-20 minutes of restarts before it will actually load windows. It gets past the bios screen then doesn't do much, sometimes it'll sit with a black screen then the computer will restart itself, other times it'll sit at the windows loading screen doing nothing until I restart it.
A couple of times it has come up with corrupted graphics, wierd characters over the screen.

Once it's in windows, it's generally better, I don't use the computer for much other then World of Warcraft and Team Fortress 2, but I do sometimes get problems, normally when I load them up for the 1st time.
In WoW, zones will take a long time to load up and in crowded areas, the game with freeze for a second.
In TF2, When I join the sever, the game will freeze for anything up to 10 seconds, while the sound is looping.

I've formatted and reinstalled Windows countless times and it doesn't seem to help much, I'm using a paid version of Nod32 for virus checking and it's found nothing.

Here are my computer specs

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+
NF4 SLI-DR EXPERT (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard
G.Skill 2GB DDR HZ PC4000 (2x1GB) CAS3 Dual Channel Kit
Zalman CNPS9500-LED Aero Flower (Socket 939/754/478/775) CPU Cooler
BFG GeForce 7800 GTX OC 256MB GDDR3 VIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express)
Western Digital Caviar Special Edition 250GB 2500KS SATA-II 16MB Cache
Western Digital Caviar Special Edition 250GB 2500KS SATA-II 16MB Cache
OcUK Value Floppy Drive
NEC ND4550 16x16 DVD±RW Dual Layer ReWriter (Black)
Lian-Li PC-7 PLUS Silver Aluminium Midi-Tower Case
Enermax Noisetaker 600W EG701AX-VE(W) SFMA ATX2.0 SLI Compliant PSU

Running Windows XP pro

I did used to have it overclocked, nothing major but this morning I put the bios back to optimized settings to see if it would help, but the problems still there.

I ran a memtest yesterday, it did 3 passes with no errors found. I'm not sure where to go from here, I've always suspected that there's something up with the motherboard, the original died and I was sent a refurbished model.

Can anyone recommend some tests I can run to get to the bottom of the problem, unless I do something, I got a nasty feeling that this computer isn't going to turn on soon.
 
Hey Del, could be hard disk? If you have another HD knocking around, it might be worth doing a fresh install on that to be sure.
 
Think you hit the nail on the head mate, I ran drive fitness test on both my hard drives (windows hard drive and a backup drive I used to have XP64 on). Both passed the quick test, but when it come to the advanced test, the backup drive flew through with no problems, where as the windows drive was slow as hell and kept stopping. After 2 hours I got bored of waiting and quit the test.

I'm going to reinstall windows on the backup hard drive tomorrow and hopefully that will have solved the problem :)
 
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