Any problems with accurate date/time? That's usually the indication of a bad CMOS battery (button battery) on the motherboard. They only have an average lifespan of 3-5 years (large spread, eh?) so if that hasn't been replaced, I'd start there. No idea if it accounts for all of the weirdnesses you are experiencing, but is a cheap and easy thing to try first.
On Tue, Mar 15, 2016 at 12:53 PM, Mark C <[email protected]> wrote: > I was away from home for over a week and left my PC unplugged and idle. > Coming home, it immediately began to fail. It periodically crawls to a halt, > the mouse pointer flickers, it become unusably slow and then suddenly work > fine - only to repeat the slow down randomly. When it slows down I see no > increase in CPU or memory usage. The slowdowns can last for several minutes > to just a minute or two. > > After rebooting about a dozen times I got the first set of POST error codes > - sort of. The PC speaker just randomly spews out beeps. No long / short > combos and the beeps are not even timed evenly - just bursts and blasts of > beeps. It happens maybe once out of every 10 boot ups, though if I enter the > bios settings when booting, and leave it there, it eventually will start up. > > One thing that may have triggered the problem: I plugged a USB 2 drive with > my photos from the trip into the PC, and it started to install device > drivers for it. The machine locked up tight during this process - mouse > pointer would not move, nothing worked. Unplugging the USB drive returned > things to normal, though an error popped up saying the device driver > installation failed. > > I have tried removing and re-seating all cards and memory. Reset the bios > from slightly overclocked to normal settings. Ran MS memory test and it > shows no errors. Ran the Windows Performance Rating benchmark while the > machine was slowed down - and oddly it shows no change in the performance > measures. Before the post codes started I ran virus scans and they were > clean and updated the video driver and mouse driver, but I did not realize > at the time that this is a hardware issue. > > I am guessing some component on the the PC is failing... It's an older > machine (2009) but so far has been up for what I throw at it. Any thoughts > about what I could do to isolate the problem? > > Suggestions about sources for a reasonably priced replacement? > > Thanks - > > Mark > > --- > This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. > https://www.avast.com/antivirus > > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and > follow the directions. -- “The Earth is Art, The Photographer is only a Witness ” ― Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Earth from Above -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
