Thanks Darren - I had my hopes up since the battery going flat while the
PC was unplugged could explain why it started malfunctioning after not
being used for several days. But after swapping out the batter the
problem is still there.
Mark
On 3/15/2016 3:01 PM, Darren Addy wrote:
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
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