Shpongled
10-24-2006, 10:14 PM
Hello everyone,
First off, I'm not entirely sure is this the correct forum to post in so if it is the wrong one I can delete this one and repost it in the correct one. I seem to be having a couple of hardware and perhaps CD drive related problems. I'm not sure what information is necessary, but I'll post anything I can think of which might help with finding the cause of the problem. I'm running an:
Intel Pentium 4, 1600 Mhz
512mb PC133 DIMM CL3 SDRam
Geforce 2 64mb MX 400 Graphics card
and a Windows XP SP2 OS.
The PC itself is 4-5 years old.
I bought the PC as a complete package, but have since then upgraded the Ram from (256 SDRam) to (512 SDRam). My first concern is likely a hardware related problem, but might be CD drive related also. Around a year ago, my CD drive started to dissapear from "My computer", thus meaning that the PC seemed to be unable to locate or even show the presence of the CD drive. It was as if I was suddenly missing the drive completely. The drive, however, seems to reappear after rebooting the computer. Since then however, the CD drive dissapears moments after inserting a CD into the drive without the possibility of even knowing the contents of the CD before dissapearing. I'm wondering is this problem common and is the cause of physical origin or something within the computer, e.g. a virus or such.
This leads me to another problem which might be connected to that of the CD Drive. Sometime after the first symptoms of the CD drive problem, the PC fried my graphics card (Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb) which the technician at the PC store pointed out by showing a black spot around the power socket to which the cord/cable from the PC attaches to. The technician said that a possible solution was that the power cords were somehow broken and consequently overheated the graphics card thereby frying it. So after thinking about it for sometime, is to possible that the causes for both problems are of the same origin? One difference, though, was that the computer was unable to start with the fried graphics card, but is capable of starting with the CD drive, so perhaps the causes are not the same?
The third problem I seem to be having is that the PC seems to be operating very slowly and not being capable of operating many programs at once, which only a year ago and before then did not cause any "lagging". For example, I am unable to run a movie and or listen to music whilst running a program such as DC++ or Bit Torrent. This causes the music and or movie to freeze for a second or more frequently (10-30 times a minute) and keeps on getting worse the longer the programs are on. Also, I've noticed that if I keep bit torrent running for a few minutes it almost always stops responding and I have to shut it down, even though I'm not running short on RAM at the moment nor using 100% of the CPU.
I have 2 physically mounted hard drives (2 x 20Gb) to the motherboard and 1 (250Gb) which I bought a month ago to free some space from the mounted hard drives. Since then I've reformated one drive completely and deleted approximately 60% of files from the other drive, leaving Windows and other programs on the hard drive. I've also scanned the hard drives for spyware using Spybot and only found around 15 infections which I've succesfully deleted. I do not run any virus protection on my PC, nor have done for some time, since it took up a considerable amount of my RAM and I dont tend to visit sites that might make me prone to viruses, although I'm not ruling out the possibility of the cause of the problem being an infection.
I would attempt to reformat both hard drives and reinstall the Windows, but that appears to be quite hard since my CD drive isn't working. Since I cannot use my Windows XP install cd, is it possible for me to download the windows on a flash drive, such as an Mp3 player and install it from there? As in making the first boot drive the Mp3 player and install it from there?
If anyone could offer any assistance or possible solutions for my problems I would appreciate it extremely much. If some descriptions are lacking in detail feel free to ask me to elaborate on them.
First off, I'm not entirely sure is this the correct forum to post in so if it is the wrong one I can delete this one and repost it in the correct one. I seem to be having a couple of hardware and perhaps CD drive related problems. I'm not sure what information is necessary, but I'll post anything I can think of which might help with finding the cause of the problem. I'm running an:
Intel Pentium 4, 1600 Mhz
512mb PC133 DIMM CL3 SDRam
Geforce 2 64mb MX 400 Graphics card
and a Windows XP SP2 OS.
The PC itself is 4-5 years old.
I bought the PC as a complete package, but have since then upgraded the Ram from (256 SDRam) to (512 SDRam). My first concern is likely a hardware related problem, but might be CD drive related also. Around a year ago, my CD drive started to dissapear from "My computer", thus meaning that the PC seemed to be unable to locate or even show the presence of the CD drive. It was as if I was suddenly missing the drive completely. The drive, however, seems to reappear after rebooting the computer. Since then however, the CD drive dissapears moments after inserting a CD into the drive without the possibility of even knowing the contents of the CD before dissapearing. I'm wondering is this problem common and is the cause of physical origin or something within the computer, e.g. a virus or such.
This leads me to another problem which might be connected to that of the CD Drive. Sometime after the first symptoms of the CD drive problem, the PC fried my graphics card (Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb) which the technician at the PC store pointed out by showing a black spot around the power socket to which the cord/cable from the PC attaches to. The technician said that a possible solution was that the power cords were somehow broken and consequently overheated the graphics card thereby frying it. So after thinking about it for sometime, is to possible that the causes for both problems are of the same origin? One difference, though, was that the computer was unable to start with the fried graphics card, but is capable of starting with the CD drive, so perhaps the causes are not the same?
The third problem I seem to be having is that the PC seems to be operating very slowly and not being capable of operating many programs at once, which only a year ago and before then did not cause any "lagging". For example, I am unable to run a movie and or listen to music whilst running a program such as DC++ or Bit Torrent. This causes the music and or movie to freeze for a second or more frequently (10-30 times a minute) and keeps on getting worse the longer the programs are on. Also, I've noticed that if I keep bit torrent running for a few minutes it almost always stops responding and I have to shut it down, even though I'm not running short on RAM at the moment nor using 100% of the CPU.
I have 2 physically mounted hard drives (2 x 20Gb) to the motherboard and 1 (250Gb) which I bought a month ago to free some space from the mounted hard drives. Since then I've reformated one drive completely and deleted approximately 60% of files from the other drive, leaving Windows and other programs on the hard drive. I've also scanned the hard drives for spyware using Spybot and only found around 15 infections which I've succesfully deleted. I do not run any virus protection on my PC, nor have done for some time, since it took up a considerable amount of my RAM and I dont tend to visit sites that might make me prone to viruses, although I'm not ruling out the possibility of the cause of the problem being an infection.
I would attempt to reformat both hard drives and reinstall the Windows, but that appears to be quite hard since my CD drive isn't working. Since I cannot use my Windows XP install cd, is it possible for me to download the windows on a flash drive, such as an Mp3 player and install it from there? As in making the first boot drive the Mp3 player and install it from there?
If anyone could offer any assistance or possible solutions for my problems I would appreciate it extremely much. If some descriptions are lacking in detail feel free to ask me to elaborate on them.