Hardware Failure or Software Failure - The Symptoms

Arkahm

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Jul 13, 2010
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Hello and thank you for taking the time to review my inquiry.

The Symptoms:
A colleague of mine is experiencing some troubling symptoms with his work PC. The PC locks up constantly, extremely long load times and at times when dragging a window across the screen this results in a "ghost replication" of the window. There have been no crashes, no blue screens, no errors and no sounds that are abnormal coming from the case.

Rectification attempt:
In an attempt to cut costs (ironically) our company decided to install new RAM without running any tests first.. I wasn't brought up to speed until I was asked to order said RAM... Skipping ahead, I personally (and properly) installed the RAM stick. Now, I did not think it was the RAM from the start. While I was installing the RAM I made sure the case was clean, dust free, well kept and everything seemed in place. This brought the PC (a multi-tasking work PC....) up from 4 GB to 8GB which really should be the minimum by now for any PC.

Result:
For a day or two the PC worked flawlessly. Now it's experiencing the same symptoms again. In my head this sounds like the HDD beginning to fail, I've had this happen myself on my personal PC. I haven't had access to my colleagues PC to run a chkdsk so I wanted to ask for opinions here in the mean time. The HDD is some six or seven years old (time for an SSD IMO). I'm happy with getting a new HDD and transferring data over (despite how much there is) but I do worry it could be the OS being corrupt.

It's not the RAM, it may or may not be the HDD/OS... What are other options? Could it be the PSU beginning to fail? I don't believe it's the mobo though I refuse to rule anything I haven't checked out.

Thank you for any insight and opinions.
 
You can run a couple of diagnostic programs.
memtest86 will test your ram.

There are vendor diagnostics for hard drives.
Seagate is seatools, wd is data lifeguard.
For an aged HDD, you may have used up most of the available spare sectors.

Most likely, the pc has contracted a virus or malware.
You can run malwarebytes free edition.
spybot s&d is another checker.


 

Arkahm

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Jul 13, 2010
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Hey guys, thanks for the info. I'll see if I can run some more tests when we shut down the office; I have run a chkdsk and it came back as fine but during the event there was an error pop up for system32.

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\windows\system32>chkdsk
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is Windows .

WARNING! F parameter not specified.
Running CHKDSK in read-only mode.

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
358144 file records processed.
File verification completed.
1391 large file records processed.
0 bad file records processed.
1046 EA records processed.
75 reparse records processed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)...
448766 index entries processed.
Index verification completed.
0 unindexed files scanned.
0 unindexed files recovered.
CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 3)...
358144 file SDs/SIDs processed.
Security descriptor verification completed.
45312 data files processed.
CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...
34357464 USN bytes processed.
Usn Journal verification completed.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.

476009471 KB total disk space.
219478596 KB in 272739 files.
173044 KB in 45313 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
474775 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
255883056 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
119002367 total allocation units on disk.
63970764 allocation units available on disk.

C:\windows\system32>





This looks right to me though...
I asked if the owner had run any malware detectors but I'll run spybot (I'm familiar with that one).
In the mean time, we recently got him hooked up with office 365, he says it started happening same day. I might try and pump a restore point into the mix and see if it was a missing update, registry... something.

Thanks for the help!
 

Arkahm

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Jul 13, 2010
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You guys are going to get a kick out of this, I just did;
I got an opportunity to graze through his PC again and I brought up task manager, just to observe while I tried running some software to check resources... make sure all his cores are being detected, etc....

I noticed his CPU frequency running low, consistently around 30% and very rarely spiking to 100%...
I went to check his power management settings and he's been on balanced which was effectively SLAUGHTERING his CPU output.
I changed it to performance and his frequency is sitting pretty at 110%, running various software programs effectively all at once.


What a silly thing to have forgotten to check...