Hullo,
I've had this mysterious problem for a while now. I recently installed a new video card on my system and it ran just fine for a few days. Then I had a really bad lock up whilst at the desktop. Ive had this sort of recurring lock up even before the new card was installed, where if I opened windows explorer or a similar file viewer, the files would vanish as though the hard drive forgot where they were and the PC would hang for about 5 minutes... then it would find the files again. Anyway, this was a really bad lock up.
Afterwards, everything ran really slowly and tended to freeze a lot. Applications had serious trouble loading. When running music, it would stutter and go buggy if I did something so simple as open a new browser and I couldn't play games. In the end, I reformatted the whole system and it seemed to have worked for a while. Then the symptoms returned randomly after running Ccleaner (a bloat nuker). Funnily enough, I had run that before the last time it went funny, so I thought it was the cause. I reformatted again, but suffered another bad lock up whilst trying to load all my music into itunes. Again, same slow-down symptoms. The hard drive claimed to suffer write errors and made funny noises before I went for a third reformat.
The point is, I think its my Hard Drive that needs replacing. None of the symptoms seem card related even though the bulk of the problems occurred after its installation. All these issues are very obtuse and hard to pin down so its hard to come to any conclusions. Any thoughts?
