CPU Failing ?

[TheBoss429]

Ok, here is my situation:

About a week ago my pc is running fine, then it completely locks up. This is the first time it has ever completely locked up, the only solution being a hard restart. So I restart, and it takes abnormally long to boot up all the startup processes and some weren't loaded at all. At this point I'm thinking I have a virus or some other such software demon screwing with my windows, I ran all kinds of virus, spyware and malware scans coming up with nothing very significant. The pc continued to run slower. I moved any important data I had to my secondary HD and formatted my primary HD just in case there was a rootkit or something I was unable to discover that was causing my problems. On a fresh install of WinXP (secondary HD disconnected, network cable disconnected) it was still taking a long ass time to load into window and I was getting intermittent hanging while doing basic navigation. CPU usage monitored through task manager was almost nill.

Now onto the hardware side of the story. The CPU is an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ and is about 4 years old (never oc'd, stock Heatsink). It has been on for probably 80% of that time. Over the past 2 - 3 months the idle CPU temp has risen from 35c to 43c. This confused me at the time because the case temp stayed at 35c, and I keep all the fans cleaned out fairly regularly. The motherboard is an ASUS K8V SE Deluxe of the same age as the processor, it seems fine on visual inspection (no bulged capacitors, anything obvious). The ram is OCZ, about 2 -3 months old. PSU is an OCZ powerstream 520w, about 3 years old, voltage pots adjusted to exact voltages with a multimeter. HD is a seagate barracuda(IDE) 80GB, same age as cpu and mobo.

Since it was a fresh install of windows and is still having issues, I'm thinking its a hardware problem. My best guess would either be the cpu or the hard drive, but I am unsure. Can anyone confirm this or help me out on the subject in some way ?

p.s. Sorry for the long post but I try to be as specific as possible. Nothing is worse than a post that goes "My computer is broken, help me!".

 

[BinarySynapse]

"nothing very significant" -- I love this part


have you checked to see if your hard drive is in PIO mode? I don't think CPU's just start getting slower as they age. They either work or they crash. So, this really sounds like a hard drive issue.

 

[The Null]

to me, your CPU sounds fine, i would take a closer look at your hard drives.

check to see if your hard drives are vibrating abnormally (either rapid violent vibrations or a complete lack of vibration) this will check to see if the platers are spinning correctly and at a good speed, also if you hard drive is clicking.

try a different hard drive, maybe a friends just to be careful.

 

[TheBoss429]

Well I held my hand to the drive as it booted up and there was no vibration I could feel coming from it. As for clicking, when the hard rive is seeking there is a barely audible noise but very quiet. No loud clicking. Same noise as old hard drives made when reading/writing but very quiet.

Also the drive model is ST380011A.

Also the drive is not in PIO mode, it is in Ultra DMA 5 mode.

 

[TheBoss429]

Well it turned out to be the HD, swapped it for an old maxtor 80gb and it is working fine now. Thanks for your help guys.