Is this hardware failure?

My computer isn't really FOR gaming, but it's always worked fine.

I have 1 gig of ram, celeron D, 3.20 ghz, and 120 gig hd. my video card is an ati radeon xpress 200, it's an intergrated card and yes I know, it blows BUT World of Warcraft ALWAYS played fine.

My only issues with low FPS came in major cities like Dalaran, where it'd drop down to 8-12, and anywhere else, and in most raids, I could get upwards of 40 FPS, which was always perfectly fine for me.

Now, something has happened. When I click WoW's icon, the game takes about 5 minutes to come up. then no matter WHERE I am or what I'm doing in the game, I get like 1-5 FPS, at all times.

I tried playing way older games, like Diablo 2, and they wont even play as good as WoW does, which tells me something is seriously wrong with the PC. One thing I notice when trying to start Diablo 2, is that there's a black screen with white numbers in the top left corner that scroll or cycle extremely fast then vanish.

Usually even browser based games are choppy, and my NES Emulator wont play right either.

I checked ctrl alt del and it shows Processes: 26, CPU Usage 100%, Commit Charge: 357M/1399M
Nothing in the up and down columns are taking up any CPU, it's all 00, cept for "System" which is at 99.

I thought maybe my ram burnt up, but I did a DXDiag in "Run" and it shows my ram as being the normal 1gig.

I also did a scan disk, it took literally ALL night to finish, but that didn't help. I've run Avira, Malwarebyte's, VundoFix, Housecall, and ComboFix. I haven't found any trojans or viruses, cept for some old ones that's been in the vault forever.

Oh, and I have Windows XP service pack 3.

Something else to mention is sometimes my PC fan just roars really loud, dunno if that's anything or not.

This all seemed to begin after the power suddenly went out in the house while the PC was on. I turned it back on when the power came on, and it's been acting like this since.

Hopefully somebody out there has a clue, you guys are pretty smart about this stuff. Thank you.

Realm.

 

The power outage definitely caused this, but exactly what it did falls into either of these things:
1) there may have been a power surge right before the outage which could have fried your CPU, making it act like that, also contributing to the loud fan, or

2)When you turn off your computer using the Start>Shut Down method, the hard drive locks the read/write arm(s) in place so that they don't drop and scratch the disk(s) when the power is cut off. With a power outage, the computer doesn't have time to do this, so your hard drive may have been scratched.

The second item is highly unlikely, but possible. The first option is much more likely and the only way to fix it it to buy a new CPU. If the problem doesn't change after that, its the motherboard.

 

Alright, thank you. I'll look into how much CPU's cost and see if I can get a good deal because I'm pretty much flat broke.

If it turns out to be the motherboard I'll just wait til I can afford a new computer and junk this one.

At any rate, again I thank you for the taking the time.

 

UPDATE GUYS


I had another Emachines, the exact same type, so I took the CPU out of it and put it in the one that's messed up and it's still doing the same thing.

Then I thought, maybe I'll put this hard drive, in the OTHER comp that I wasn't using! it worked beautiful. My comp was finally fast, CPU usage was under 100% and all was good.....

But then it started finding a bunch of new hardware, and needed to restart. It restarted, and now this spare comp is doing the EXACT same thing as the comp I first wrote about..so it HAS to be the hard Drive right? even though it worked awesome before the update restart?

What do you guys think?

 

/bump

 

put a new hard drive in the original computer and see what happens. if everything works, then you're gonna have to transfer your data (NOT your drivers, they may contribute to the problems) and reinstall your applications. its a pain in the ***, but necessary with new hard drives.