Something is wrong with my PC...

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11 Dec 2004
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Right, well, I built this PC a month or so ago (first build) and it's been ticking along brilliantly until about a week ago, and I'm starting to get a little worried about it.

First off, it stopped going on standby when I asked it to. It was quite content to sit at the 'Preparing to stand by' screen for hours at a time (I just quickly hit the standby button and left the PC a few times, only to come back and find it still on) and do absolutely nothing. This happens every now and then...maybe 1/4 of the times I try putting it on standby.

Secondly, when it comes off standby, it occasionally tells me that 'a cable has been unplugged' from the Realtek HD Audio Manager box. No cable has been unplugged, and the Realtek HD is a chip on the motherboard that I'm not even able to remove, so I don't understand that message. I can't get any sound out of the PC after this message displays, but a restart cures this problem.

Thirdly, the hard drive has started making some dreadful sounding choking noises. You know the noise that hard drive makes when it's spinning up when you boot up the PC? It's taken to doing that repeatedly at times, most often when its trying to shut down, but even if I leave a DVD paused for 5 minutes or so and then come back. The whole PC freezes up. This is the major worry, of course - I feel I've had my share of hard drive problems, and I'm not looking for any more. It's a 320Gb Hitachi Deskstar. I'm going to back up everything important as soon as I have time, likely at the weekend.

Fourthly (is that a word?), when I was playing Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines today, or more correctly just after I quit the game, the PC restarted. For no reason. It's never done this before. When it came back on, the CPU fan was (and still is) going at full pelt, whereas usually it isn't even on when the PC is idling, or on the internet, or similar. It's maybe at 400rpm max, but just now it's at 2400+, with the temperatures of the cores in the mid-twenties. It's been doing this fan-speed thing more and more often of late too, and nothing seems to get the fan to reset back to a less audible speed, short of perhaps turning off the PC and turning it back on again.




I'm annoyed, and a little worried about this. My old PC had plenty of problems within the last year or so, and I was hoping I'd left them all behind when I got this new one. If any more specs or information are required, let me know. :o




Thanks in advance
tTz
 
the backup's a good idea, I'd consider running a virus-scan, and spybot search and destroy. then possibly some h/d tests, hd-tach comes to mind. good luck !! ;)
 
What might 'HD-Tach' be?

Virus scans are done regularly, and the last Spybot was only last week (after the problems had started) but I'll quite happily run both again just to be sure. I dunno, I'm kind of getting the feeling that the fault (if there is one) lies with the motherboard. Maybe I've plugged something in wrong. Strange though that it didn't throw up issues before now, if it's hardware that's at fault.
 
google HD tach, you'll find it. It runs speed and health tests on your hard drive. It could be you've get a dodgy drive. Normally if they're gonna fail, it'll be within the first couple of months, after that you're fine for years. It could just be some power saving settings wrong tho, powering it down, and then realising it needs it and turning it back on again straight away. See if there are any driver or bios updates for your hardware, the sound things sounds like a driver issue, and if you have driver issues some of the tings that suffer most are standby and hibernate. Again though, its strange it wasnt an issue before, have you updated any drivers recently?
 
Nope, haven't changed any drivers since I installed Windows for the first time on it. I do seem to recall having issues with the install of the audio driver, but it worked just fine, and I assumed XP was being paranoid. I'll maybe hunt down the drivers for that then, and update them, or reinstall them if there's no update available.

I'll give the hard drive thing a go. Here's hoping it's not going to die on me. :(
 
Right, here's my HD Tach results:


hdtach.jpg



Done with the 32Mb option. Thoughts?
 
have a squint around here for some hitachi-specific diagnostics - just to rule out h/d error.

if its not your h/d, you may want to update other drivers, run memtest, maybe a stress-test or two to check system stability. you shoud probably do this anyway.
 
if its not your h/d, you may want to update other drivers, run memtest, maybe a stress-test or two to check system stability. you shoud probably do this anyway.


Do it anyway? Mate, only obsessive enthusiasts bench the hell out of their PCs, people who just want them to work never usually bother. Since I'm having problems, I'll run stability tests, but I'd never have bothered otherwise. As far as I know, all drivers are up-to-date, but I'll check that out and confirm it. I admit that I've still not tracked down a new sound driver, if there is one...been busy and lazy. It's amazing how long it's possible to spend being busy while doing nothing.


Any comments on the hard drive test thing I posted above? I thought the dips were a little concerning, but checking the comparisons that the program has, it seems fairly normal. :o
 
Right, well I ran a Hitachi diagnostic, and it comes up clean. The drive seems to be fine. I'm starting to run out of ideas here. Hell, lets be honest, I've got no idea what to do now. :o
 
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