PC with Mondayitis?

Hi all,

In 2009 we built up 2 PCs for a customer; al lgood quality hardware: ASUS M4A78 Pro 4 Motherboard, AMD AthlonII Quad Core 630 CPU, Kingston 4GB DDR2 RAM, ASUS eN8400GS Silent VGA Card, Western Digital 500GB HDD, Super Multi DVD Writer, Antec Black Tower Case, Silverstone 500W Power Supply, Logitech Cordless 1500 Desktop, Microsoft Windows 7 Pro64. The two systems are located around 3m from one another.

One of them has developed a consistent problem that every Monday morning (the business is closed Saturday afternoon and Sunday), or every morning after a public holiday, the system boots only after a 20-minute cycle through System Repair. On every other day, it boots fine. I have examined the logs, and no information is found - probably because there is no crash. Recently, to resolve other (probably unrelated) issues, I had to rebuild the system, reinstalling Windows on a reformatted system partition; however, the problem persists, implying a hardware issue. The other system, located nearby, does not exhibit this behaviour, and I can identify no specific environmental issues that could contribute to this: the systems will cool to pretty much the same temperature in the the same time. To fix this problem, I need to know what to replace!

Can anyone point me in any useful direction - even to some tool that will point me towards a solution?

Thanks,
Edwin :confused

 

Hi

If its a business I'd recommend them use a UPS anyway even if its not the issue but if a slight power cut/surge is causing the problem it will solve it.

Second I would check the shutdown options to make sure the computer isn't hibernating when the power switch is pressed,could it be the person who uses the computer on Friday is turning it off with the power button which is putting it into hibernate/sleep/standby and then there's some kind of power instability?

I would also try to replicate the problem by shutting down the computer then disconnecting the power,with the power disconnected press the power button again which will drain all remaining power from the capacitors,reconnect the power then try to power the machine up. Next I would try removing the bios battery to replicate the problem. I then try replacing the bios battery with a new one or swap with the computer next to it.

A repair install is usually instigated when windows detects a hard shutdown or hard drive corruption and then would be my next avenue of investigation,the hard drive. Hard drive manufacturers usually have tools to benchmark and test their drives so I'd head for the manufacturers website for such tools.

Could you post the other problems you were having?

 

There were two other problems.

One was a corrupt Thunderbird inbox file - this may have been connected to the Mondayitis problem if the hard disk (which I also am beginning to suspect) is the problem. That wasn't the one that prompted the reinstall.

The other problem was some rather weird behaviour of the user's profile. In the admin account, the desktop would load with the standard Win7 mode, but in the user's profile, it would load in the "optimise for best performance", Windows 2000 mode. After asking whether the user had done it for a reason, he said he hadn't done anything (yeah, I know, but this guy I'd probably believe); so I changed it back. Then on rebooting, the Windows 2000 mode was back. Also, there were no restore points being saved, despite all the settings and disk space being fine. So something was clearly wrong - and evidently had been for some time. Hence the reinstall (and the hope that it just may fix the Mondayitis.

 

I'd be wondering if the video card driver has been installed properly after the reinstall or whether its the right driver,windows switching to a lesser video performance mode can sometimes be a symptom of this.

Could you also check device manager for any exclamation marks just to be on the safe side.

So:-D No restore points being saved for that I'm gonna shoot for user account control:-D Is there any software installed that limits user access due to this being an office PC?

I'm not coming up with one single problem that can explain all the symptoms and I don't think you'll find one,I believe it will take some investigating.

My apologies also I forgot you posted the name of the drive,here's where I'd start testing the drive.

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=608&sid=3&lang=en