The newer of my two PCs is driving me insane.
It's been behaving erratically for some weeks - hanging during games, occasionally refusing to start up, and most recently refusing to connect to the internet until it has been booted up once fully and then restarted. Oh, and it had recently been refusing to shut down when told.
Today I decided to reformat and do a clean reinstallation of XP Pro.
Well, I've spent all day trying this. I have reinstalled first the standard version, then the adulterated version on my PC's recovery disk, and now the standard version again, reformatting each time.
So far I have had:
Two errors involving missing or corrupted files
Three installations which hung during the installation process
At least one complete failure (would probably have been a BSOD if I had them turned on)
Obviously this has to be a hardware problem - but what is most likely? My only previous similar experience was cured by replacing the HDD (after a number of alleged experts had told me that it wasn't the problem!)
A wee bit of web research seems to suggest the same.
So... do I go out and buy a new HDD tomorrow, or do I take the machine to my computer guy instead?
It's been behaving erratically for some weeks - hanging during games, occasionally refusing to start up, and most recently refusing to connect to the internet until it has been booted up once fully and then restarted. Oh, and it had recently been refusing to shut down when told.
Today I decided to reformat and do a clean reinstallation of XP Pro.
Well, I've spent all day trying this. I have reinstalled first the standard version, then the adulterated version on my PC's recovery disk, and now the standard version again, reformatting each time.
So far I have had:
Two errors involving missing or corrupted files
Three installations which hung during the installation process
At least one complete failure (would probably have been a BSOD if I had them turned on)
Obviously this has to be a hardware problem - but what is most likely? My only previous similar experience was cured by replacing the HDD (after a number of alleged experts had told me that it wasn't the problem!)
A wee bit of web research seems to suggest the same.
So... do I go out and buy a new HDD tomorrow, or do I take the machine to my computer guy instead?
