Thanks Igor -
I don't know what to look for in event viewer... I read through all the
logs but the only entries that repeat over and over are ones that
indicate a normal state. The whole "Application and Services Logs"
section is blank - nothing in there, including the Hardware section
(where I expected there would be something.) Does that mean that it is
not turned on?
I did try a system restore but before this happened the machine
downloaded and installed 30 some updates and created 5 restore points -
at least. So the best I could do was restore it to a state a few hours
earlier. Not sure why I have so few restore pints... but with the
beeping upon power up, before windows loads, I assume this is a hardware
issue and not a windows issue anyhow.
Mark
On 3/15/2016 3:01 PM, Igor PDML-StR wrote:
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
---
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.
