First thing I'd look at is the power supply. See if there's a local computer shop with a service department that can test it for you.
Around here it's $20 for "express" (while you wait) diagnostics & $30 to replace a power supply. The power supply itself is maybe another $40 - $50. If you want to do it yourself, it might be worth investing in one of these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA24G28N4655&cm_re=power_supply_tester-_-9SIA24G28N4655-_-Product On 3/15/2016 1:53 PM, Mark C wrote:
I was away from home for over a week and left my PC unplugged and idle. Coming home, it immediately began to fail. It periodically crawls to a halt, the mouse pointer flickers, it become unusably slow and then suddenly work fine - only to repeat the slow down randomly. When it slows down I see no increase in CPU or memory usage. The slowdowns can last for several minutes to just a minute or two. After rebooting about a dozen times I got the first set of POST error codes - sort of. The PC speaker just randomly spews out beeps. No long / short combos and the beeps are not even timed evenly - just bursts and blasts of beeps. It happens maybe once out of every 10 boot ups, though if I enter the bios settings when booting, and leave it there, it eventually will start up. One thing that may have triggered the problem: I plugged a USB 2 drive with my photos from the trip into the PC, and it started to install device drivers for it. The machine locked up tight during this process - mouse pointer would not move, nothing worked. Unplugging the USB drive returned things to normal, though an error popped up saying the device driver installation failed. I have tried removing and re-seating all cards and memory. Reset the bios from slightly overclocked to normal settings. Ran MS memory test and it shows no errors. Ran the Windows Performance Rating benchmark while the machine was slowed down - and oddly it shows no change in the performance measures. Before the post codes started I ran virus scans and they were clean and updated the video driver and mouse driver, but I did not realize at the time that this is a hardware issue. I am guessing some component on the the PC is failing... It's an older machine (2009) but so far has been up for what I throw at it. Any thoughts about what I could do to isolate the problem? Suggestions about sources for a reasonably priced replacement? Thanks - Mark --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus
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