Computer crashed last week and hasn't been the same since

**Tickle** · 20-03-2012

Hi everyone,

I'm new here and I hate to bring a problem, but I just don't know what else to do and would prefer to not have to do a Windows XP re-install. I'm hoping that someone may know what's going on with my PC.

What happened is that:

1. The DVD drive started making a funny noise and the OS started freezing up.

2. A blue screen of death appeared, the first one I've seen on this machine in years. I rebooted and it wanted to run CHKDSK, but I cancelled. Past experience has shown it to delete work files I most recently work on, so I proceeded into XP and backed up files I was working on when crashed.

3. I rebooted and ran CHKDSK and it fixed bad indexes, deleted corrupted files and orphaned files.

4. All week the computer seems like it's doing excessive hard drive activity to do simple things, like open a program. Even going to hibernation now takes 4 to 5 times as long and sometimes it now won't even go into hibernation, rebooting instead. The HDD doesn't run constantly, just goes mad whenever I make it do something, like it's working twice as hard for the same tasks.

5. Starting up (not from hibernation) takes a long time.

6. When it goes into the desktop, the Windows XP startup music is played and it's skipping, sounding like a badly-compressed MP3, as if there's too many CPU cycles or something.

7. Playing large-size videos from the camera also makes it do the sound skipping effect, but smaller compressed videos don't do it.

I've verified that write-caching is enabled for both my hard drives.

Before this problem with the DVD drive (I've left it unplugged), my Windows XP SP2 PC was running smoothly and without any issues.

I run AVG Anti-Virus in the background but it has never been a problem before. I don't see any unusual processes in the task manager.

I last defragged my drives about three months ago.

Would anyone have an idea of what has happened to make it act this way?

Thanks!

Tickle.

**DanielaA** · 22-03-2012

You can try by restoring the system to some other earlier date when this was running well. If this does not help you then you can also try by repairing the system and see if that solves the problem.