Could this the motherboard slowly dying?

Hi
I'd appreciate some advice/opinion - on and off over the last year my PC has become erratic in performance (I have been through all the malware checks both myself and with a local IT shop testing it). Sometimes the DVD drive doesn't work, then does after a restart. Possibly a seperate thing but I have never been able to backup the hard drive using the Windows (XP Pro) facility but maybe it isn't a very good tool. I have a netgear DG834 router connected but we lose the internet connection several times a week. Mostly after rebooting the router and then the pc a few times, we get back up again. Over the last 2 days, the mouse was not responding, it was possible to move the cursor (ie not a frozen screen) but not possible to click and open or highlight anything and one of the USB ports sometimes doesn't read for no obvious reason. The power supply has been weird ever since a local pc help guy took it out and put it back in and it surges every now and then for no reason - there doesn't seem to be a tie up with the other malfunctions, they don't happen at the same time as each other. Does this sound like the slow death of the motherboard to anyone - if not, what else could I look at? Thanks in advance for any thoughts. Jules :confused

 

It sounds to me like you might have a power problem. I would not think that separate things on your motherboard would all be slowly failing at the same time. I would let a few other people weigh in, but I would probably replace the power supply first. What do you mean when you say that your DVD drive stops working? Does your DVD drive still appear to be functioning, but only disappear from your system?

 

Sometimes the CPU goes up to 100% and the fan kicks in (well speeds up so I can really hear it). The power or the fan or the CPU, not sure which I'm hearing, makes sort of whooshing sounds as it surges (bit hard to describe) but obviously it's not right. When the DVD drive doesn't work, I would have put a disc in, the light on the drive would show it's reading but then nothing. When I click run or try anything, it's just dead. After taking out the disc and rebooting, it often works. This applies to trying to do something with discs ready to write to as well as discs with data on. With DVDs with data on, i.e. a game, you can see it in Explorer but often just the drive and not showing that a disc is in there. The weird thing with all of this is, the PC can then behave completely normally for a week or two until the next time.

 

first thing to do is carefully check the motherboard, look for blown, stretched or leaking capacitors.

If everything looks peachy then try a different power supply, multi-point failures on a board do not usually come and go repeatedly over a 12 month period.
If it was one thing coming and going i'd say change the board, but so many is unusual.

 

When the PC guy took out the old one, did he put a new one back in? When you go to try a new power supply make sure you get one that is big enough to support the original specs of the system. That might also be why things intermittently fail. Depending on what else is drawing power, different devices might not have enough current to work properly.

 

Hi, you may very well have a failing motherboard. If it has been in the case long enough to accumulate a lot of dust and you have been in and out of the case something may have happened. Mine was running perfectly for a couple of years and had a lot of dust on it. I decided to transfer all the hardware to another case and cleaned off all the dust first. after I got all the parts installed in the new case and fired it up only 512 of ram was being counted and it had previously counted 1024. I figured a 512 ram stick went bad somehow and ordered another. In the meantime the computer worked fine with only 512 megs of ram. I finally put the new ram in although I had to figure out which stick went bad and the computer never worked right again. On bootup it counted 1024 and everything seems ok and no errors could be found but it exihibited strange behavior now with random cursor freezeups, programs hanging, sound issues. some pretty weird stuff. some of the programs that hang will not hang if they are the first program to be launched. all the errors point at a hardware problem specifically memory(0x00000000). after I installed a new motherboard all the problems disappeared. some static electricity from the dust may have zapped something on the board. I would try another motherboard.

 

I think the difference to consider is that the alontheriver was experiencing similarly situated problems. The computer was not functioning properly on processing items. JulesM seemes to be reporting a wide variety of problems that appear to me to be more hardware related. He does not report that he is experiencing software errors.

Any update JulesM?