PC unstable - hardware or software?

[scruffeh]

My PC has just gone from being 100% stable to regularly acting up, and I'm trying to work out if it's a hardware problem or not. The main problem is that it is hanging within a lot of applications e.g. I'll be watching Starcraft 2 VODs and the window will become unresponsive, and often Google Chrome will report as not responding, while also not letting me ALT-TAB, or bring up the Task Manager etc. It will often run fine, and Starcraft 2 hasn't crashed at all, but it does now seem to take forever to exit the game. Quite a few times the PC has hung indefinitely, and I've had to reset it manually.

I've had a couple of booting issues following hard resets, and the PC has now reset to its un-overclocked state, it also booted into the dual bios twice, again following a hard reset.

My next move was going to be to reformat the main HDD and reinstall Windows, but it did occur to me that my problem might be hardware related, possibly PSU. Unfortunately reformatting at the moment isn't as easy as it could be, as I will have to do a lot of data juggling to keep my files.

The main question is whether the BIOS and booting issues (which have been rare) are caused by a fault, or my PC baulking at being rebooted so many times in a short space of time.

My system:

Intel Q6600 - was overclocked, now running at stock
Tagen Easycon 580
4GB Geil RAM
2x 60GB Vertex 2E HDD
Asus Xonar D2X
Sapphire Radeon HD 5700

I've checked the temperatures and they are fine (circa 43 CPU idle on all cores with Coretemp)

Any help would be much appreciated. Cheers.

 

[GodMac]

I run the same processor and clock it to 3.0ghz. I've had similar things as yourself and would always look at registry or clearing down unwanted files incase there are programs clogging in memory. If you have old apps that you don't use remove them as updates from Microsoft can have program changes that interact with other processes or service you have running.

You can also do a full scan using Windows Defender or MS Search & Destroy and just make sure your system is clean.

You should also make sure that any program entries in registry are removed so use Your Uninstaller which will remove programs and ensure any registry entries are also clear. Hope that helps.

 

[mp260767]

are you running the 2 ssd's in a raid config ?

try running memtest over the memory to make sure thats going ok.

have you reset your cmos ?

try running 1 stick of memory on different memory slots

remove the sound card from the system

if not running the ssd's in raid disconnect power from the none system drive if possible.

can't see that it should have a problem with being rebooting unless your powering it up and down like a loon.

 

[scruffeh]

Thanks for the input guys. It seems it was my old RAID array, which I used to use as my primary drive, before getting the SSDs. I realised that the problems started just as I starting using the drive again, so I managed to split them and reformat, and everything now seems fine again. Fingers crossed that it will continue to be stable!