EDIT: Deciding on new PC

[Hobie-wan]

You need to get to the option to tell it to not automatically reboot on BSOD so you can read it. The 0X0000000** code will help you figure out what's going on. BSOD can be hardware or a really misbehaving driver.

[Xeogred]

Got that setup now.

Okay I had no idea there are hidden devices in device manager, I do have yellow warnings for:

Microsoft PS/2 mouse

And under Non-Plug and Play Drivers:
Security Processor Loader Driver
sptd

They're all error code 24.

Other than that I just manually checked for updates on everything and they all seem good.

EDIT: Well, Crystal Disk Info is showing over 1,000 current pending sector count. All sources are leading me to believe that yeah that is terrible and it's failing.

EDIT2: Free Memory "0"...

Time for a new PC I guess.

Should I just get into safe mode and copy what I can, or is there a better method?

I'll probably just get something cheap off newegg to hold me over, any suggestions?

[irixith]

EDIT: Well, Crystal Disk Info is showing over 1,000 current pending sector count. All sources are leading me to believe that yeah that is terrible and it's failing.

Boot into safe mode w/command prompt. (when your computer boots, right after the initial bios screen blanks off, press F8 a few times for the menu to pop up).

When it loads up, do: "chkdsk /f /r" without the quotation marks.

It might take quite some time.

When finished, reboot into Windows normally and give CrystalDiskInfo another run. Problem still exist? Back up that hard drive and get a new one. No need to buy a whole new machine, unless this is just a good excuse to upgrade. :p

[Xeogred]

I've run normal chkdsk's, but is that a repair? Maybe I'll give that shot. Not too hopeful at this point though, lol.

It won't be a huge upgrade but yeah I've wanted something better for awhile anyways, if I go that route.

[MrPopo]

I've run normal chkdsk's, but is that a repair? Maybe I'll give that shot. Not too hopeful at this point though, lol.

It won't be a huge upgrade but yeah I've wanted something better for awhile anyways, if I go that route.

I think at this point it's best to take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

(aka, just bite the bullet and get a new machine)

[Xeogred]

Yup.

You guys wanna help me pick out something on newegg? lol. The selection seems pretty mediocre right now and I'm not really interested in Windows 8 at all. I see some decent Acer's in the ~$500 range, but yeah would like some second opinions.

I don't know what my range is gonna be here. I could probably do $700 or something, but ~$500 would be more ideal... if the gap is that crazy quality wise though I'd probably go for it. Not looking for something with a ton of room to work with or upgrade, but having some options wouldn't be bad... unlike these slim machines that you can't do a thing with.

Doesn't need to be a gaming beast, but being up to par with some newer stuff would be nice (plus I still want to go back and play the Stalker games with mods haha), and other than that I mostly just use my PC for media. Dual monitoring is a must (triple would be nice if doable, lol), right now I have this ill PC hooked up to my monitor and HDTV. And since I had this slim thing for years, I built up a collection of external drives among other things, so lots of USB ports is always a plus. But that doesn't seem too hard to come by now.

Nothing too wild I guess. The PSU's look bad for most of the prebuilt stuff though and I just never wanna skimp out on something like that due to this debacle... so I guess that's something I'd like to upgrade down the road, based off of the selections I'm seeing right now.

I guess this all sums up why I'm not incredibly angry about all this though, looks like I'll get all my data backed up by tomorrow (I hope) and other than that I've just had a very long love/hate relationship with this slim machine for years now... lol, my wallet won't be happy though, but I can manage.

[Xeogred]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lh_dGts6TeQ

What do you guys think of this?

Maybe I'll go the build route instead. I need something asap, but yeah.

For now I just hope Firefox's sync thing works and does what it says it does... I need to get all my bookmarks moved over for bills, lol.

[tintinmayo]

I may be too late, but in case someone else has the same problem.

The office I worked for used to have a laptop that had the same problem. It was just damn slow for no apparent reason (it was running a barebones xp with just office and avast installed). No amount of reformatting and tweaking did anything, they even replaced the hard disk and the ram. One thing we noticed was that it's no longer charging, but the battery still works on another laptop. So we charged the battery to full and put it back, and it ran normally again. Fast as it should be.

However, when we plugged the power again, the thing slowed down to a crawl again. It's only slowing down everytime the AC adaptor is used. One of the tech guys suspected that the AC adapter was broken and wasn't supplying enough power. We replaced it with a universal laptop adapter and the laptop went back to normal - it's fast again.

I don't really understand the exact explanation of the tech guy, but he said the motherboard or the processor was purposely slowing down because it wasn't receiving enough juice from the AC adapter.

Maybe your old PC's PSU (which is rated for 220w, according to the site you linked to) is already dying and is no longer supplying enough power to the motherboard, resulting in the slowdown. Maybe you can buy a new PSU (a true rated one) and try it first. You're going to need a true rated PSU for your next desktop anyway (it's not advisable to use the ones provided with the case if it's a generic one)

[isiolia]

What do you guys think of this?

Maybe I'll go the build route instead. I need something asap, but yeah.

For now I just hope Firefox's sync thing works and does what it says it does... I need to get all my bookmarks moved over for bills, lol.

Generally good build. Personally I would probably go for a Z77 board from a brand I've bought before, though that would likely double the cost of the motherboard (or more). If you have a Microcenter nearby they have great deals on CPUs (and often motherboards) for in-store only.

IMO, if you want to get into something now, but don't have much to spend, follow a build like that and omit the video card (but buy the decent PSU needed to support it). Current integrated graphics are still much better than what you have, and you'll get the capacity to add a better card when you can better afford to.

(if you do that, you do need to make sure the ports on the motherboard match how you want to hook up displays for the time being).


If your HDD is functioning just grab your profile folder from the Firefox Application data (path varies on OS). It has your bookmarks stored several different ways.

[Xeogred]

@tintinmayo: That's definitely interesting. Maybe that is the case, it's funny it's been taking days to back things up now and I haven't given the PC a rest, but everything went smoothly and it really doesn't feel as hot as it was (before I cleaned it). So this still seems like a very weird issue... I'll do a chkdsk repair when I'm done and then maybe look into the PSU. Are there ways to test if they're still healthy and providing what they need?

I should have mentioned earlier that I did put in a decent Radeon in here awhile back, I did a lot of research on it and it sounded like it was the best half-profile sized card I could get that wouldn't burden the PSU either. In that research and I kept looking around off and on though, it seems really hard to find a PSU that would work in this thing. Unless just about anything would work, but yeah it sounded like the case size and whatnot was a big issue for potentially replacing it. I stumbled upon some reviews of people saying it wasn't possible and stuff.

Hell, what would be worse is testing another outlet... has that ever happened to someone, not getting the juice from an outlet? I do have three strips coming out of one outlet, which I guess is kind of silly and probably too much. I think it'd be weird if that were the case though when my TV, consoles, external drives, etc are all fine though. But I've run into some weird issues before with things needing to be directly in the wall, etc. I'm no electrical expert... lol. I guess when things are all backed up and I can shutdown I'll give that a quick test.

I guess I'll see how things go this week.

@isiolia: I guess I could look around Microcenter for some of this stuff, I've heard people suggest getting CPU's from them before. Also it just hit me seeing this guy link everything to Amazon, that I could finally put my Prime membership to real use here. Everything he links is Prime qualified and so I'd get free two day shipping on all that stuff, wow that's definitely good timing and would probably save me a good bit for something like this so I'll just have to consider taxes.

I honestly think I am set on just finally getting a new PC, but yeah ideally it would be extra nice if I can salvage this other one too. So I'll definitely keep looking into it and consider the suggestions.

Thanks for those who keep checking up on this! Heh.