Well thats all I need, got a nice new shiney laptop to tune Megasquirt with and then the home PC gives up the ghost!.

Basically the PC will sometimes boot and sometimes not.. or it'll work very very slowly and then bluescreen.

It did this a couple of days ago and I just told Vista to go back to how it was tea time the night before and it worked ok for a day or so.

When it is working very slowly it appears to waiting for the HDD, the HDD LED flashes up and reads a burst of data and then it goes slow again (it doesn't sound too good either).

The HDD is a Western Digital 200GB SATA drive thats only about 6 months old, I decided on a change of makes as i'd not been having much luck with the previous Maxtor drives i've had.

Could it just be Vista thats gone tits up and needs re-installing or do people thinks its the worst fate and the HDD's gone again?

What do we think folks?, or any ideas how to get it back?

Might be problems with the on board sata controller - I've seen that before. I've had Maxtor drives in this PC for 7 years so far, on most the time, with no problems what so ever. (touches wood)

Has Windows Update loaded any new drivers onto the PC? If so then when you roll back a couple of days (before the drivers were installed) it behaves, after installation plays up?

Do you have any Anti-Virus apps on the PC? I ahve seen with some (Sophos/McAfee and possibly others) that at times they decide to do an update and run 99% CPU making the machine appear dead... Given 30 mins they burst back into life and everything is peachy again. You will be able to confirm this looking at Processes in task manager to see if something is hogging CPU time.

Another thing to try is a checkdisk on the drive. It could be that it has gotten corrupted somehow.

Mark

Try rolling back to the working restore point and then disable Windows updates for a while and see if it goes wonky again - if not then its down to a rogue update of some sort.

[Edited on 28-12-07 by RazMan]

Hmm, My windows update stoped updating in early december so I have been trying to get that working again, it does seem a big common problem that Microsoft have no answer for.
It went haywire a few days ago and I did manage to restore it to how it was the previous night and it then ran ok all that day and all the next.

I then found some instructions on the internet as a possible way around the update problem, it suggested:

Turning off Windows update in the Administration Tools in the control panel.
ReNaming the windows folder "Softwaredistribution" so windows would create its own newer version and hopefully right itself.

So now all the previous updates.. and rollbacks have disapeared. I've obviousley tried to undo the re-naming an restore the old folder but its having non of it

I've got the windows sidebar CPU and RAM monitor open and thats sat Idle until the HDD gives its burst.

At the moment i'm just thinking of linking it upto another computer and getting the information over and doing a clean install... but would rather get it working thats much easier lol.

Worth checking the HD for bad sectors. I've spent the last couple of days with a completely dead PC due to this. If you have data you care about not backed up and you find bad sectors (software should be available from the HD manufacturer to check this). I'd recommend HD regenerator.

When I checked my hard drive the diagnostics was able to tell me it had been over temp at some point 253... I hope it means F not C!

[Edited on 28/12/07 by chasmon]

Windows recovery itself has run Chkdsk at some point and whilst finding some kind of errors and changing them it hasn't found any bad sectors as such.

In the last few years I do seem to have gone through a few HDD's. Its used mainly for surfing the net, and the odd bit of downloading or games, and even very rarely video or editing etc. There's a full sized case fan blowing directly over the HDD's so its unlikely that they've ever overheated, but I wil look on the MFR's website and see if there's any recomaneded software to check the disk.

Does you PC do a memory check?
It could be that some memory chips have died and are paging to your hard drive instead slowing the system right down.

Thanks for your responces, after leaving the computer on all night it appears to have been windows "search indexer" thats a main integral part of windows.

When I had a look at the computer this morning it had come up that it had faulted on this "search indexer" and after looking into it, it has a few trys to re-start before showing you the error screen.

After reading on the net aparently the index goes loopy if its being accessed and the computer blue screens. From what I understand it indexes things so windows can find them quicker.. but should the index go wrong it goes haywire.
But there are explanations on how to reset/restart the index and it appeared to have worked ok.

But considering how many problems i've had with it, i've just re-installed Vista again, so fingers crossed it runs smother than it did before now it'll have the updates from the start.

Well I thought it was sorted!

Now i've just about installed everything i'd lost.. it appears to be doing the same thing again.

Ifyour watching a film for example and try to fastforward half the film you can hear the disk physically clunking! then eventually if your lucky it'l go to where you want.
Half the time it seems to ok, but then other times opening windows mail or MSN or IE even it fails or can take 10 mins and the computer freezes completely imbetween.

There's not realyl that much stuff on the PC to be interfering with windows so if its making physical clunky sounds I'm guessing is the HDD itself

Does that sound a reasonable conclusion?
As i've had it before when i've taken a HDD back within the Guarentee period as the "master boot record" had failed after similar episodes.

I had to argue the fact that if there was nothing wrong with it then why has it "failed"

oooh clunking noises are definitely not good - almost certainly the hard drive. Get your data off it quick and replace it asap.