Hello, folks... In my efforts to finally see if there's anything I can do to save my poor computer, I've come here.
About 8 months back my PC suffered a bit of a tumble (Desk broke.. What rotten luck.) It took a good hit to the case, and while I opened it up and checked, nothing looked to be dislodged or out of place. I put the PC back into service the same day, and it was making strange noises at boot-up. The noises stopped after a second or two, and it proceeded to boot just fine. However, as the months have gone on, worsening problems have become apparent. The most recent problems (last month or two) is that if I shut it down, sometimes it does not boot correctly, and auto-restarts itself until it can boot properly. Progressing from that I decided to start leaving the machine on full time, since I was unsure if the next boot would be its last. Well, power failures happen, and it has had a few forced restarts since then, each making the strange noises for a short while until it boots.
Lately, however, it has taken to locking up whenever the computer sits idle for too long. I checked to see if perhaps any of my Norton anti-virus tools might be causing idle-time lockups, but as they are all disabled this s rather unlikely. So I took to leaving a program run in full screen mode whenever I had to be idle, or away from my machine. This seemed to help for about a week or so, but has recently stopped preventing lockups.
A few other PC-Savy friends have suggested that my PC might be experiencing a hard drive failure, and I am wondering if this is the case, and if so, if there is anything I can do to prolong the life of my machine, as money is far too tight to replace parts, or buy a new machine.
Thank you, I eagerly await a response if possible
About 8 months back my PC suffered a bit of a tumble (Desk broke.. What rotten luck.) It took a good hit to the case, and while I opened it up and checked, nothing looked to be dislodged or out of place. I put the PC back into service the same day, and it was making strange noises at boot-up. The noises stopped after a second or two, and it proceeded to boot just fine. However, as the months have gone on, worsening problems have become apparent. The most recent problems (last month or two) is that if I shut it down, sometimes it does not boot correctly, and auto-restarts itself until it can boot properly. Progressing from that I decided to start leaving the machine on full time, since I was unsure if the next boot would be its last. Well, power failures happen, and it has had a few forced restarts since then, each making the strange noises for a short while until it boots.
Lately, however, it has taken to locking up whenever the computer sits idle for too long. I checked to see if perhaps any of my Norton anti-virus tools might be causing idle-time lockups, but as they are all disabled this s rather unlikely. So I took to leaving a program run in full screen mode whenever I had to be idle, or away from my machine. This seemed to help for about a week or so, but has recently stopped preventing lockups.
A few other PC-Savy friends have suggested that my PC might be experiencing a hard drive failure, and I am wondering if this is the case, and if so, if there is anything I can do to prolong the life of my machine, as money is far too tight to replace parts, or buy a new machine.
Thank you, I eagerly await a response if possible
My Computer
System One
-
- Manufacturer/Model
- Dell
- CPU
- Intel(R) Core 2 Quad CPU Q8200 @ 2.33GHz 2.33GHz
- Memory
- 6.0 GB
- Graphics card(s)
- Radeon HD 4550
- Monitor(s) Displays
- 1 AOC Monitor
- Screen Resolution
- 1680x1050
