Major PC problems

Thermo Nuclear Penguin · 23 Jan 2008 at 23:54

Right I am having big problems with my computer at the moment :mad:

Basically what’s happening is;

On startup when it gets the loading screen (green bar going across screen on Vista) it sits there for about 5 minutes before continuing to load into Vista at a ridiculously slow speed. It also takes an age to load into safe mode...

Once in windows it is constantly freezing for a few seconds at a time and then continuing (all be it very slowly) Its not always a complete lockup, sometimes if I’m listening to music, only this will glitch and then continue playing, other times it will be a complete lockup.

I was watching a video on it and it kept completely crashing, i managed to put the video onto my portable hard drive and it ran fine...

I thought this could mean hard drive failure? but HD Tune says the health is OK...

I have run the Microsoft memory diagnostics to see if that came up with anything but it came up clean.

I am going to try a clean install of windows as that will rule out any corruption, but its seeming like a hardware failure?

If you have any thoughts please help me!

melbourne720 · 24 Jan 2008 at 08:19

Have a look in control panel - it could be the hard disk is running in PIO mode (very slow mode). Run HD tach and show us what speeds you are getting. You're right that it must be the hard drive.

Thermo Nuclear Penguin · 24 Jan 2008 at 08:36

Ok I'm just about to pop off to work and with the speed of the startup it will be next week before I can run the test! I did however run the speed test last night and the peak transfer was around 52mb/s and slowest was 0.2mb/s. (they were the numbers, but I am assuming its mb/s)

I will run it again tonight when I'm in from work and will post more accurate readings and also check for it being in PIO mode.

Thanks so far!

sja360 · 24 Jan 2008 at 08:49

could it be a virus or ? its just i havent heard of a harddrive being that slow even if its on its last legs, dont they continue to run i.e. make errors and eventually crash windows due to errors?

memyselfandi · 24 Jan 2008 at 08:55

Are there any indications of errors in the Windows event log?

pegasus1 · 24 Jan 2008 at 12:09

Its a long shot but happened to me the other day in XP, I booted my pc from cold and it just hung on the loading screen prior to the password logon. Tried rebooting several times checking that the correct HDD was selected to boot first and that all cables were correctly attached. I even booted in safe mode and again it hung. I remebered that i had Pro Evo 08 in the Drive so removed the disk, re-booted and blow me down it was fine.
Worth a try

Thermo Nuclear Penguin · 24 Jan 2008 at 18:45

Right sorry for the delay...

I ran a benchmark on HD Tech and here are the results...

It may well be a virus, but i have done all the usual scans and they have come up clean.

I think I am going to do a clean install of vista tonight and if the problem persists once on the clean install then it only leaves hardware failure.

As for POI mode for the hard drive, I couldnt find where to find if its in that anywhere, but considering i didnt change any settings on my pc, I would say all the settings are fine.