What do you guys this the problem is?

Hi guys,

PC Specs:
Pentium 4 2.6GHZ
1GB RAM
2 IDE Hard drives
Geforce 6600GT 128 MB graphics card
Windows XP

This is my old PC which my girlfriend uses (I have a lovely new build ). She uses it to play games and we watch tv shows on it at night. Up until I built my new PC last month, this was my main PC and I kept it running well; no spyware/viruses, regularly defragmented and ran well for what it is. The computer took about 20 seconds to boot into windows after a restart, sitting on the windows loading screen for about 4-5 seconds on average.

About a week ago I notied that when watching tv shows horizontal lines would briefly appear on the screen every now and then, like the computer was strugaling to keep up sometimes. This was new, and although not the highest spec computer in the world, it can certainly play divx videos no problem. At around the same time as this my girlfriend started expiriecning problems where she's get the message the grphics card doesn't have enought power. I reseated the graphics card and the power plug and that seemed to solve the problem, but a couple of days later I turned on the computer and I got the "no signal" message of my monitor.

After reseating the graphics card a few times and checking the cables I tried an old card I had lying around, which worked fine , so came to the conclusion the graphics card had died. I went out and bought a new graphics card, bearing in mind I'd just forked out quite a lot for my new build and didn't need a top of the range card, bought a Nvidia 7600 GS 256 MB. Now when I turn on my computer it sits at the windows loading screen for literally 20 to 30 seconds before booting into windows, and the game that used to play fine on medium graphics on my old card barely manages low settings with the new, better card.

I've cleared a lot of the crap from the hard drive so there is more than 50% free space, defragged it, done a number of disk checks scanning the surface for errors which find none, and I'm basically stumped as to what the problem could be. Does this sound like a hard drive, processor, ram, motherboard or graphics card problem? One thing that seemed strange, although possibly un related, is ever since the graphics card died I've been getting hard ware installation popups for a audio device, and going into the BIOS, the onboard soundcard that was disabled had become enabled again, which seemed strange.

I'm pretty sure I can rule out graphics card because I had the same loading issue with the test card.

Is there a free peice of software I can use to check the health of my components to see if any are failing? Or can someone who's had this kind of expirience tell me what might be the problem?

 

if you have another power supply laying around I would swap em out.It sounds like your power is basically too low.also make sure all drivers and bios are up to date. Make sure to fully uninstall video drivers before reloading them.