Hard Drives or Mobo corrupt?

[Valloq]

Here's my rig (Sorry I'm a little light on details, I didn't put this together)

ECS K7S5A Motherboard
Athlon Duron 1.2GHZ
256 MB PC133 Ram
Riva TNT
Maxtor 90840D6 4 gig ?
Western Digital AC34300L 8 gig ?

Windows XP

Anyways...here's the problem. The computer feels really slow in comparison to a T-Bird 1Ghz and a P4 2ghz that we have...like the Duron feels way slower than the T-Bird 1Ghz. It just lags a lot, and from time to time I might get a warning from the system try telling me that a file is corrupt and to run chckdsk. There is almost no software installed on this comp other than the basics. Then...my AIM Buddy list will start to go crazy, like the buddy group names won't appear, or messages that people send me won't be readable, like the messages just don't show up. When I try to load web pages, they don't fully load sometimes like content will actually be missing, but if I try to refresh it just loads the same thing again. And on a few occasions, I've booted up and the main hard drive (The Maxtor) won't be detected...I'd have to restart a few mores times until it is. So here's my question: Any idea what the problem is here? I'm leaning towards the Hard Drive, but I feel it could be the Mobo too. Please help, thanks.

 

[Ape]

With a four and an eight gig HD. Those are most likely the problem. They are old and slow. I would get atleast a 40 gig 7200 rpm drive. Magnetic Media (HD) do start to fail in time. These might be going out or just can't keep up with the demands of XP. I currently have an Athlon 1.2 and a Duron 800 system at home and both have XP Pro installed. I see almost no difference in speed while using the OS in either system. So I would rule out the CPU. The video should be fine and you have more than enough memory to run XP. Ape Out.

 

[DaiShan]

Any time you start getting corrupted files I would suspect the hard drive, also with a system like that there is no reason to be running those 2 ancient hdd's, go to hot deals find a good deal on a 20 gig 7200 rpm drive, and take the other two out.

 

[KaEdOgG]

Sounds like those hard drives are about to die. Do your computer a favor and install a new hard drive. Bigger hard drives are getting cheaper and cheaper each month, I'm doing the same to my girlfriend's 8GB hard drive - too slow, too small for any significant work nowadays.

 

[Valloq]

Thanks for all your help you guys, turns out it was the hard drive dying on me.