messed up pc

[mooerr]

My wife has a demented PC, and i cannot seem to fix it.

It is a fairly decent machine and until recently ran without problems.

Problems apparently began following a crash during connection to MSN Messenger.

Scandisk ran after restart and found and truncated some files from the content.ie5 folder in temporary internet files.

The pc then started ok, but kept freezing. Restarting was required and scandisk ran again.
This happened many times, despite trying everything i could think of to fix it.

Eventually the PC even froze during scandisk, so I used a boot disk to start the pc and ran a full surface scan. The surface scan appeared to stop several times, although pressing enter to get 'more info' seemed to restart it.
At about 38% the pc returned a couldn't copy data error. Pressing retry froze the machine.

I considered that the hard drive might have a problem so I disconnected the hard drive and fitted a spare one. After formatting it I tried to install Windows XP. Again this went so far and then the PC froze again.

Can anyone think of any reason why I might be experiencing these problems, because it is new to me. Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[Lemon13]

check the temps, seems it´s running to hot. the vent´s are running propper?

 

[AnalogAnomaly]

I agree with Lemon13. It sounds as though you might be having cooling issues. You might want to try blowing out any dust in the case, keep the side panel off and boot up. Does the CPU fan spin? CPU fans have a tendacy to spin slowly or not at all when clogged with dust or debris. Smoking around computers also has a tendancy to shorten the life of fans. Another thing to consider is case cooling. You want at least one fan pulling air into the case in the front and at least one fan pulling air out of the case in the back. It's also important to have air blowing across the hard drives. If you have a Compaq, HP, or E-Machine you might not have space to mount any fans. Unfortunately this has been the case for these manufacturers for several years and will probably hold true for several more. Button up the case and power it on, leave it on for a bit then press your palm against the top, is it very warm or even hot? If it is and you don't have any place to mount fans I would consider a new case.

 

[TekTippy4U]

What OS "were" you using?
What OS "are" you now trying to install?
If you came here about halfway thru your post, maybe coulda helped with last installed OS.
Do you want to Clean Install NEW
What disks do you have? (OEM ver, Restore, Upgrade?)

TT4U

Notification:
These are just my thoughts....and should be carefully measured against other opinions.
Backup All Important Data/Docs

 

[dfz]

Hello;
Had a similar problem with my 1st PC:everything went bananas on my Maxtor 60G.Downloaded a Utility from Maxtor which pumped out some error codes that prompted Maxtor to replace the drive.Everything worked fine for about a month and things went screwy again.Got drive replaced and put a special HD cooler on.Fine again for several months,and here we go again.Finally replaced the 80 ribbon cable and 2years later no further problems.Worth a try.Regards,DF