I have been having some major problems with my computer for a while now, which could possibly be related. I thought someone here might be able to give me some ideas; I have been reading AT articles for a while but haven't come here before. This was my system configuration before all the problems started: (it's still the same except for the memory)
Athlon Tbird 1400mhz processor
ASUS A7N8X nF2-400 motherboard
512MB crucial PC2100 DDR SDRAM
GeForce3 (original) video card
Maxtor 160GB ATA133 hard disk (7200rpm, 8mb cache)
Windows ME
About four months ago, the hard drive started going very slow, but in an unusual way. For example, when copying a file over say 50mb, it wrote around 45mb quite fast and then just paused there for about fifteen seconds (during which period the computer hung up), came back to life and wrote another 40-odd mb very fast, paused again, and so on until the file was written. In addition to this, once in a while the computer would actually freeze completely (even when the HD was idle) and upon restarting the hard drive could not be detected at all, but shaking the drive itself a bit allowed it to be detected again and fixed the problem temporarily. I tried connecting the disk through a PCI ATA133 controller and still got the same problem, so it wasn't an issue with the motherboard's IDE unit. I probably should have paid more attention to this earlier but was busy with various other things at the time.
The problems became a lot worse about three weeks ago, as the computer kept randomly freezing up much more often, especially during games. I noticed that the processor temperature was 63C/145F when idle and went up to 72C/161F under only medium load, so there was definitely something wrong. After some head scratching, I realized that I hadn't bothered to remove the fan from the heatsink (the cooler is a Vantec FCE-62540D) when cleaning out the computer and it turned out that there were some large and very thick pieces of dust stuck in there. They were so solid that at first glance I thought they were some kind of rubber padding.
After I cleaned those out, the temperature dropped quite dramatically, to about 51C/124F idle, the computer suddenly started working fine, with proper Windows loadups and no crashes even after playing games for several hours, and it seemed that everything was okay. The problem returned the next day though; the computer again randomly crashed and/or restarted itself quite often, even though the temperatures were now quite acceptable.
The problem got steadily worse over the next week, as the frequency of the crashes increased and eventually both Knoppix and Windows failed to load up at all; the computer either froze up or restarted itself early in the loading sequences. I didn't have any spare, working components lying around to debug
the machine, so I gave it to Best Buy's diagnostic service. They said that at least one of the memory modules was almost certainly bad and the hard disk and motherboard were possibly so as well. So I went out and got some new memory (two generic PC3200 256mb modules) and I could now get the computer to start up (in both windows and knoppix), but this time, many programs that had worked fine before refused to load at all, giving various protection fault errors and BSODs (any games with the unreal or unreal warfare cores, some control panels) and those that worked at all froze up or gave such errors within half an hour. In most of the freeze cases, if I waited for about 40 seconds, it suddenly came back to life and then worked fine for a while longer, although occasionally it had locked up for good. This looked like the hard drive acting up (the original hard drive pauses were still there) and I was getting the same problem with Knoppix, so it wasn't Windows-specific either. I therefore removed the HD altogether and the crashes have become much less frequent (in Knoppix), but they are still occurring every now and then, and as far as I can tell, the machine doesn't just come back to life again.
So that's where things stand now and I am not really sure where to go from here. Any suggestions on what I should do? I think there is almost definitely something wrong with the hard disk. It's still under warranty and I managed to back up everything I needed, so I could easily get it replaced, but it looks like there is some other problem too. I have heard that the Athlon 1400 does not react well to heat and I don't know long it had been running at those temps, so could the processor have been permanently damaged because of that? I have already had one of these inexplicably die out on me about two years ago, but it was under warranty back then. I could not see any obvious burn marks on my current one, but it's hard to tell. I was going to upgrade the processor anyway (along with the video card) but there wouldn't be much point if it's something else that is damaged.
Any help here would be greatly appreciated.
Athlon Tbird 1400mhz processor
ASUS A7N8X nF2-400 motherboard
512MB crucial PC2100 DDR SDRAM
GeForce3 (original) video card
Maxtor 160GB ATA133 hard disk (7200rpm, 8mb cache)
Windows ME
About four months ago, the hard drive started going very slow, but in an unusual way. For example, when copying a file over say 50mb, it wrote around 45mb quite fast and then just paused there for about fifteen seconds (during which period the computer hung up), came back to life and wrote another 40-odd mb very fast, paused again, and so on until the file was written. In addition to this, once in a while the computer would actually freeze completely (even when the HD was idle) and upon restarting the hard drive could not be detected at all, but shaking the drive itself a bit allowed it to be detected again and fixed the problem temporarily. I tried connecting the disk through a PCI ATA133 controller and still got the same problem, so it wasn't an issue with the motherboard's IDE unit. I probably should have paid more attention to this earlier but was busy with various other things at the time.
The problems became a lot worse about three weeks ago, as the computer kept randomly freezing up much more often, especially during games. I noticed that the processor temperature was 63C/145F when idle and went up to 72C/161F under only medium load, so there was definitely something wrong. After some head scratching, I realized that I hadn't bothered to remove the fan from the heatsink (the cooler is a Vantec FCE-62540D) when cleaning out the computer and it turned out that there were some large and very thick pieces of dust stuck in there. They were so solid that at first glance I thought they were some kind of rubber padding.
After I cleaned those out, the temperature dropped quite dramatically, to about 51C/124F idle, the computer suddenly started working fine, with proper Windows loadups and no crashes even after playing games for several hours, and it seemed that everything was okay. The problem returned the next day though; the computer again randomly crashed and/or restarted itself quite often, even though the temperatures were now quite acceptable.The problem got steadily worse over the next week, as the frequency of the crashes increased and eventually both Knoppix and Windows failed to load up at all; the computer either froze up or restarted itself early in the loading sequences. I didn't have any spare, working components lying around to debug
the machine, so I gave it to Best Buy's diagnostic service. They said that at least one of the memory modules was almost certainly bad and the hard disk and motherboard were possibly so as well. So I went out and got some new memory (two generic PC3200 256mb modules) and I could now get the computer to start up (in both windows and knoppix), but this time, many programs that had worked fine before refused to load at all, giving various protection fault errors and BSODs (any games with the unreal or unreal warfare cores, some control panels) and those that worked at all froze up or gave such errors within half an hour. In most of the freeze cases, if I waited for about 40 seconds, it suddenly came back to life and then worked fine for a while longer, although occasionally it had locked up for good. This looked like the hard drive acting up (the original hard drive pauses were still there) and I was getting the same problem with Knoppix, so it wasn't Windows-specific either. I therefore removed the HD altogether and the crashes have become much less frequent (in Knoppix), but they are still occurring every now and then, and as far as I can tell, the machine doesn't just come back to life again.
So that's where things stand now and I am not really sure where to go from here. Any suggestions on what I should do? I think there is almost definitely something wrong with the hard disk. It's still under warranty and I managed to back up everything I needed, so I could easily get it replaced, but it looks like there is some other problem too. I have heard that the Athlon 1400 does not react well to heat and I don't know long it had been running at those temps, so could the processor have been permanently damaged because of that? I have already had one of these inexplicably die out on me about two years ago, but it was under warranty back then. I could not see any obvious burn marks on my current one, but it's hard to tell. I was going to upgrade the processor anyway (along with the video card) but there wouldn't be much point if it's something else that is damaged.
Any help here would be greatly appreciated.
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