Problem with friend's PC

htphm42

Gawd
Joined
Jul 19, 2008
Messages
934
So my friend have an old amd x2 pc he built 2-3 years ago. Recently, he's been having lots of problem with it. For starters, his xp got corrupted and he was not able to get pass the window loading screen without going through safe mode. He has since reformatted and now face the annoying problem of the pc lagging and slowing down to a halt after about 30-45min of use. It would come to a state where no programs could be open or continue running, although you could still move the mouse; Alt-ctrl-del does nothing.

The second problem which I've noticed (maybe related to the first) is that his 8600gts is running at an extremely high idle temp (>70C) and even higher under load. He's not using the latest bad Nvidia driver that kills card either, but rather the one that came with the card on the CD. In fact, all of his parts seems to run a bit hot idling. The CPU idles at 53C, NB and SB around 55C, etc. The ambient room temp is around 75F. I'm thinking that its an overheating problem, but the PC was able to run at this temp without problems and temp doesn't seem to deviate very much during normal use. If it's the CPU or GPU overheating, you would expect the PC to shut down to prevent damage, but this is not the case. And isn't 55C under the threshold for NB/SB temp? Other than the high GPU temp, I don't think overheating is causing the problem, although that may be it.

In either case, any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
 
How about cleanning all the dust from cpu and videocard first? If temps drop then that was the issue, if you want to go further, reapply thermal compound to cpu and videocard hetainks.
 
If he had data corruption, and random lock-ups / crashes now, I'd start with a memory test.

Download memtest and make a bootable CD..

http://www.memtest.org/

Let it run for a few hours and see if the memory is bad.
 
check to see if all the fans are working. It sure sounds like a heat issue. What psu doe she have, how old? Give the case a good cleanout, re-seat the ram.
 
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