Soldato
- Joined
- 17 Jan 2006
- Posts
- 4,313
Right, this could be a long post.
A few weeks ago my mums computer (P4 3ghz, 512MB RAM) started making a strange noise. It sounded a little like a hard writing type noise but louder and a bit more squeally.
We wondered if it might be a problem with one of the fans. But wierdly, while it was fairly constant, it also seemed to occurr at various times when working on the computer, for example scrolling through a list of files in Windows Explorer.
We thought it might be the hard drive dying.
After a couple of weeks, the computer started crashing, at first it was occassional but has gotten worse and worse to a point whereby it can take several (6 or more) attempts to get it into Windows and not have it crash immediately. By crash I don't mean it blue screen or anything like that, it just literally dies and reboots.
Each time it tries to boot, it does a disk check and has thrown up errors about the pagefile.sys being corrupt or truncated etc.
My guess was that the hard disk was dying.
I purchased a new HDD and, having managed to backup everything from the old disk, decided the easiest option would be to bung the new drive in and start a fresh install of windows. I started to do this and formatted the drive to NTFS and started to install windows and it crashed again much to my surprise.
I'm now wondering if it might be a problem with the power supply?
I do somewhere have a spare powersupply which I intend to try this weekend.
If the different power supply doesn't solve the problem I really am stumped as to what the problem moght be?
I have tried disconnecting the CD drive but it stiull crashed.
I have tried running Knoppix from CD and it seemed to be working much better, it booted first time and stayed working for about 20 minutes before crashing again.
I would have disconnected any pci cards but there aren't any, it's onboard sound and network and nothing else so I don't know what else I can check really.
I am going to run memtest to see if the memory is ok, after that and trying the different power supply I am out of knowledge...
Does anyone have any thoughts about what the problem might be if it's not the memory or the power supply?
Any help very veyr much appreciated.
A few weeks ago my mums computer (P4 3ghz, 512MB RAM) started making a strange noise. It sounded a little like a hard writing type noise but louder and a bit more squeally.
We wondered if it might be a problem with one of the fans. But wierdly, while it was fairly constant, it also seemed to occurr at various times when working on the computer, for example scrolling through a list of files in Windows Explorer.
We thought it might be the hard drive dying.
After a couple of weeks, the computer started crashing, at first it was occassional but has gotten worse and worse to a point whereby it can take several (6 or more) attempts to get it into Windows and not have it crash immediately. By crash I don't mean it blue screen or anything like that, it just literally dies and reboots.
Each time it tries to boot, it does a disk check and has thrown up errors about the pagefile.sys being corrupt or truncated etc.
My guess was that the hard disk was dying.
I purchased a new HDD and, having managed to backup everything from the old disk, decided the easiest option would be to bung the new drive in and start a fresh install of windows. I started to do this and formatted the drive to NTFS and started to install windows and it crashed again much to my surprise.
I'm now wondering if it might be a problem with the power supply?
I do somewhere have a spare powersupply which I intend to try this weekend.
If the different power supply doesn't solve the problem I really am stumped as to what the problem moght be?
I have tried disconnecting the CD drive but it stiull crashed.
I have tried running Knoppix from CD and it seemed to be working much better, it booted first time and stayed working for about 20 minutes before crashing again.
I would have disconnected any pci cards but there aren't any, it's onboard sound and network and nothing else so I don't know what else I can check really.
I am going to run memtest to see if the memory is ok, after that and trying the different power supply I am out of knowledge...
Does anyone have any thoughts about what the problem might be if it's not the memory or the power supply?
Any help very veyr much appreciated.
