OT: Comp. troubles. Need Help

[twosticks]

Okay, Had comp in the shop this past Mon-Tues. Shop cleaned out the comp ( reformatted comp)

 

HP 551w

MS WindowsXP Pro, version 2002-service pack 2,

Pentium 4 CPU 1.6GHz, 0.99GB of RAM,

 

Shop also installed SoundBlaster Live sound card since he couldn't find driver for current sound card (didn't have sound for a year until now) and MS Office for my wife.

 

Wife originally took to shop because she said it was "freezing" up on her. No problems when I used it. Had cable comp. here yesterday and modem was working fine. He did replace the cable line from pole to house to lower the signal to noise ratio on cable line and found some corrosion on pole connection. Computer has been working great up until today.

 

Now when comp. boots up the setup screen on the bottom says: "WARNING; immediately back up your data and replace your hard drive, a failure may be imminent." Also comp. now "hangs up" at times. Is like I'm on dial up even when not on line. Can type and will be "ca" (then 5 seconds later) "can type" and then be fine for a little bit.

 

I'm taking the comp. back Mon. morning and see what can be done. What do you guys think??? I have anti virus and anti spyware. Sorry for the legnthy explanation, just wanted to give all the information.

 

THANK YOU TONS for any help anyone can give and even if you can't, thanks for reading and have a nice day. ANd if you don't see me on here for awhile, you might know why. Thanks again for any thoughts:)

[BroadST]

Sticks, it sounds like your hard drive is about cooked. I have a real good friend who (thankfully) is a PC guru. He described a hard drive to be like a light bulb. One day, its working perfectly, the next day "Pop" and its gone. Sometimes its not totally gone and they can grab your data and sometimes its completely gone. Now, I am no expert but if you have a chance, I would back up anything you have on there you can't afford to lose, just in case.

[1001gear]

It's possible that because of the freezes, your wife was using a manual restart. Cutting the power and rebooting IOW. I read when you do that you should wait one minute for the platter to slow before hitting the power again or you can physically damage it.

If you trust your geek then definitely take it back. Otherwise, copy all your important stuff and pick up a replacement drive. They don't cost a lot these days. Replacement is a DIYer if you follow instructions implicitly.

[twosticks]

Yeah, I think the guy might be able to fix it. If not, he does have other refurbished computers for sale. I know my wife's thinks he's the one who broke it. Me, I don't know. It was working fine before, just no sound and a little slow when the antivirus would boot up. But then again, this thing is from 2002 and has served us well. We've added memory and uped the RAM and now a sound card.

 

The weirdest thing to me is how it was written in plain English "Back up your data and replace hard disc" I would have thought it would be like "Line failure in grid 113:/// terminal disc failure;\" or something.

 

I wish I knew more about computers so I could do more myself. It always gets me when shop guys start telling me how doing this or that could cause this or that. Then I say "Oh so when I'm doing this, then it causes that!?" (following their exact logic) and their response is "well...not really, I've never known that to cause this, you would have to have some back and forth before that would bother this."

 

What's also weird is right now comp. is acting great. but in 20 seconds can be like a cell phone with a dead battery and a loose power cord. Thanks for the input guys. Any info can help. I mostly just thought it weird how it said "Replace now" like it might be some hoax. But I've run my virus and spyware tools and it didn't pick up anything. Again, BroadSt and 1001gear THank You for the Info!