HAR, I was guessing what coolaid your computer had drunk... ;-)
what you are describing might be consistent with the timeouts when
Windows is waiting for a device to respond, - and that could be due to
the damaged driver installation.
Under "Administrative Tools" find "Event Viewer", and check for the errors
in it. If you've got some drive timing out (or a reference to the faulty
device file, or something like that), - that's it.
While there, look for other clues.
Just in case, here where to find it:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/open-event-viewer#1TC=windows-7
In that case, I'd
1) delete the drivers for the faulty device
2) would try to "restore" from the automatic Windows backups (Control
Panel -> Backup and Restore
Choose the date that is just before your USB drive incident.
Cheers,
Igor
Mark C Tue, 15 Mar 2016 10:57:31 -0700 wrote:
And that's supposed to be DYING PC - it's perfectly dry.....
On 3/15/2016 1:53 PM, Mark C 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
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