Strange Problem

I need your opinion. My video card burnt up. I picked up a used AGP card. Works great. But then after a while I started seeing problems with corupted files and thought I had a virus for sure. I followed the forum and checked every which way and found nothing. But the problem got worse and worse. Then one day my second hard drive failed. A friend of mine was able to restore it. He says that a "sector" was bad and ran some utility on it and it's as good as new. But when I asked him to have a look and see what he thought about the possible virus problem a new problem popped up. The pc would begin to boot but only for a second and then go dead. The only way to get it to start was by cycling off the power on the power suply on and off until it started. I rebooted it about 10 times without a problem at the time. But it keeps doing this trick from time to time. Once it fails to start you have to turn off the power at the power suply and let it bleed off before it will attempt to start.

The power suply was checked and it's ok. The repair shop is guessing it's the mother board and wants to replace it! I'm thinking it could be the video card myself. I did pull out the ram and clean the connections. Now it "seems" to be working. WTH could it be that easy? Can the ram corrupt files like that?

So now I just have to wait and see I guess. BTW is there an easy way to fix windows corrupted files. Or is the reinstall the only way?

Thanks for your time.

Mike

 

It may be the motherboard but i don't think ram can corrupt windows files. Just wait and see if it does it again.

 

Well it's still doing the same old thing. It doesn't want to start from a cold start. Once it is warm up after running for a bit. It will reboot everytime !

Does changeing MB mean I have to reformat my HD. I have XP on a partition.

Mike

 

The way that thing wont start cold leaves me to think power supply, but, maybe not. And more than likely if you go to a new mb you will have to reformat. Here is a repair read,

http://www.help2go.com/Tutorials/Windows/How_To_Repair_XP_and_Avoid_a_Full_Reinstall.html

 

It's a little late for this but I traced the problem to a faulty heat sink on the processor. It would trip out the pc momentarily. We started swapping out parts untill there wasn't anything left exapt that ! Swapped it out and everything is OK!

Mike