Sorry if I sound crabby, but I am. this thing is driving me nuts!:mad: Explain to me as though I’m retarded and don’t know squat about computers. That would be about right. Also, I’d rather not spend any money right now so “put a bullet in it” like my drunken buddy told me Saturday is not my first option.
My home computer is extremely slow and “hurky jerky”. It takes forever for anything to open. Sometimes I hear a BEEP and the thing freezes for anywhere from 30 seconds to 5 minutes.
Then sometimes the screen goes black and I have to reboot the computer by pushing the power button and turning it off. But sometimes it will not turn back on with the switch. I have to unplug it and wait 5 minutes, plug it back in back in and turn it on with the switch.
Sometimes the CPU tower makes this noise like something is running very hard and fast. But it doesn’t seem to be the fan that’s doing it. It’s a loud hard, whirling sound though. It does this when the screen goes black and has to be rebooted. You can hear this noise 2 rooms away it’s running so hard and fast. But doesn’t seem to be the fan.
It has taken me 15 minutes to type this out because all of a sudden what I’m typing won’t have shown up and I have to wait for that circle icon thing to stop spinning (it suddenly appears) and the letters I typed to catch up. it may take me a long time to respond to posts because of these problems.
*Windows Vista (:rolleyes:Yeah, I know. This is just a home computer used for the internet, not much else).
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*Norton full virus protection full subscription updating daily scanned daily
freezes and reboots are usually a sign of hardware problem. as was just said, it could be full of dust and is overheating. Or there’s failing hardware (many times it’s the system memory.)
Have you opened up the task manager to see what’s sucking the resources? Go to the Processes tab and sort by CPU and/or memory to see what the culprit is.
Nothing to do with Vista. I have a very old Vista machine which runs fine, thought I am eagerly awaiting Win 10.
Do you have a full complement of memory? If you watched movies, can your disk be betting full? But the first thing to do is clean out the dust and check for spurious processes.
Sounds like it’s overheating. It’s the only thing I can think of to explain why it won’t reboot again immediately when you manually shut it off. Time to get a can of air and a vacuum and open up the case.
Sound is either the DVD drive racing away a fan going bad or a ribbon cable touching the fan blades. Yes it could well be full of fluff and dust so its worth brushing it out. But as a first step i would download CCleaner run that and clear out some of the junk files it will find…
What am I looking for?
Remember, I’m a total idiot when it comes to this stuff.
It says Processes 73, CPU Usage 26% Physical memory 53%
No disc has been in there for years. Double checked just to be sure.
Ran CC multiple times.
:)Thanks for the responses. I did spray air into the fan and air fin ducts. Will open case tomorrow and check. Please post any other ideas if you have them.
The symptoms described are definitely consistent with a hard drive that’s on its last legs. During normal operation, the system is going to be reading from and writing to the hard drive, and if it’s starting to fail, some of those operations are going to take a long time, which will make things very unresponsive.
There is some built-in monitoring in most hard drives. Here’s a link that shows you how to check it. Scroll down to the “Checking S.M.A.R.T. Without Third-Party Tools” section. Just a simple command.
And, before you do anything else, if you have important files that aren’t backed up, go buy an external hard drive and copy them over ASAP.
And, before you do anything else, if you have important files that aren’t backed up, go buy an external hard drive and copy them over ASAP
I agree that it’s probably your hard drive dying. With the case open, you should be able to pinpoint the noise.
I would buy a new internal hard drive and a cheap (like $20) external case and then you’ll be able to clone the old drive to the new drive or at least do some backups before you install the new drive.
This isn’t really a coherent explanation of anything, and there’s no way for running out of space to harm your motherboard.
pkbites, I doubt that disk space is the primary problem, here. Something making a loud noise in a computer suggests that there’s some physical thing that’s wrong. But if you go to My Computer, you should see your hard drive listed with a little bar that will show how much space is in use. If it’s over 90% full, it’s possible that clearing out some space will help things. But again, it’s probably not the primary issue here.
It is the typical plaintive beep many computers make when they turn on or is is an actual sound effect like a windows error message. Getting a BIOS beep while windows is running would be extremely weird.
This would make me think thermal issues especially the having to wait for a while before it would turn on again. If popping the cover shows alot of dust in heat sinks and fan areas a good blasting with compressed air might help significantly.
Again, thermal if you can hear a hard drive two rooms away its already long dead.
This can be thermal issues but there are half a dozen other common issues that could create this behavior
Start with a dusting, heavy dust contamination can also result in signal/charge bleed between traces on the board causing all manner of odd behaviors.
Computer is already booted up. I’ll be online (things are slow) and one quick, sharp “beep” and the screen is frozen. 30 seconds to 5 minutes later it unfreezes.
I’m leaning towards the thermal thing. I’m going to open it up and check the dust inside when I get home tonight.