Help...possible CPU problem

[jimythang09]

I'm a first time poster here but would greatly appreciate some help. I've been having problems starting up applications for about a week now. Every application I start will halt for about 10 - 15 seconds before it actually resumes loading. I'm not sure what is causing this but my first reaction to the cause is the CPU. The sound it makes actually sounds like the computer is locked up. With that said, once the application is up and running it runs fine (i.e. IE, RealOne Player, etc.) but I have noticed the last few days that the application I am running will freeze for a few seconds, a hicup so to speak. Also, when I try to multi-task with the same application (Internet Explorer) it will keep reloading the second occurance over and over again until a eventual program crash. Is this a CPU, HD, and/or motherboard problem or something else? Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much.

AMD Athlon 2500+ Barton
Chaintech GeForce 4 Ti4200 128MB
Epox 8RDA+
80 gig HD (Seagate I believe)

 

[cp_4eva]

hmm,,, i would suspect your HardDrive first,
i had similar problems

See if you have two seperate IDE cables for your HDD and your CD Drive/ FLoppy Drive

just take sure your Cd drives and HDD are well connected with your IDE

 

[jimythang09]

The HD, CD, and Floppy are on separate IDE cables...and they are well connected. I think you may be right about the HD though. The problem is that none of the applications are responding quickly. As I've mentioned before, the applications seem to get hung up. I use my PC mainly for gaming and I noticed while playing a game, in single player, the game would pause a couple of times for about 5 seconds at a time. I would think nothing of this if it were multi-player but if shouldn't happen in single player mode. I've noticed this with my media player, IE, and other applications as well where it would pause then start agian a few seconds later. Are these symptoms of a failing HD and if so what steps should I take? Thanks again!

 

[HoLoCroN]

Try to increase your virtual memory (Page file) on your PC (Assuming you have Win2k or XP) This should alleviate some memory and processor resources and push it on your hard drive. Just a test, cant hurt.

 

[Lord Kalthorn]

Yeah, something like that would be caused by your RAM or your Hard Drive - using Kazaa or a P2P system like it on Broadband or on Dial Up too much can cause overuse of the Hard Drive and make everything else very slow. Especially when its running. Increasing Page file wouldn't go a miss, or shutting down programs which aren't needed. If its the Hard Drive then you can just hope that a program is writing and reading a lot instead of the hard drive just being too slow.

 

[jimythang09]

Thank you for all your help...unfortunately I'm at work right now so I can't mess around with anything to give you guys feedback on my progress but I will let you know if anything changes. One question though, I'm not sure how to increase my virtual memory so any help would be great. Thanks again.

 

[jimythang09]

Well guys, all indications as of right now say that the problem is fixed. I moved my file page to a separate partition on my harddrive (thx HoLoCroN) and used a simple method called CHKDSK. You're all probably thinking of why this idiot didn't try this early and my answer is I don't know. I ran CHKDSK and I had 40 unreadable file sectors. After the completion of this everything is running better that ever before. I do want to thank everyone for their help and I will definitely seek your help in the future, now, if only EA/DICE would patch their BF Vietnam game.

 

[Lord Kalthorn]

Lol! We can only dream.