Yet another computer problem.

Pet Terry · Mon 06/09/2004 20:39:15

Okay, I have got a rather weird and annoying problem with my computer. Couple of times a day my computer starts humming really loud (they sound is probably coming from the harddrive, atleast it sounds like something is being loaded from the harddrive, except that the sound is louder than usual harddrive loading noise) and it lasts for several minutes. The internet freezes during that time, so I can't load any websites, downloads got stopped and MSN and irc freezes. After it's over (like I said, few minutes later) everything returns to normal.

I don't know what is causing this though. I'm using Windows 98. I'm suspecting it MIGHT have something to do with Symantec Live Update thingy, but I'm not sure. It got installed with Norton Antivirus which was my virus shield for quite a long time until I decided to change to a less heavy program. I haven't uninstalled Live Update yet, but I might aswell uninstall it soon to see if it does any good. As far as I know, no programs should be using it anymore.

Does anyone have any ideas what could be causing this?

Andail · Mon 06/09/2004 20:59:16

I'm not good with computers, but how about your processor stops or something due to overheating, the fan kicks in extra-fast and the system gets cool again after some minutes?

remixor · Mon 06/09/2004 21:45:09

Something similar happened to me with my laptop last year. It turns out one of the brackets holding the hard drive in place was scraping against the drive itself. I had to buy a new hard drive and I lost everything that was on it.

dasjoe · Tue 07/09/2004 00:04:42

check your hdd, sounds like you've got defective sectors.

run a complete scandisk, for all partitions.

Pet Terry · Tue 07/09/2004 12:57:14

I tried running complete scandisk for the harddrive. It ran fine for a while when suddenly, suprise suprise, the blue screen of death! The same happened when I tried to defrag the harddrive few days ago. I have feeling I should be taking backups of important files soon... that won't be easy though, because I only have normal cd-rom drive.

Elianto · Tue 07/09/2004 13:07:48

Open your pc and check what's doing the strange noise.... maybe the cpu fan doesn't work good and this maybe cause of the freezing (that you can repair just changing the fan) check because this can also damage the cpu. If the noise comes from the hard drive be sure to backup everything soon because when an hd start doing noises it's death is near.

Barbarian · Tue 07/09/2004 13:14:46

It sounds like perhaps your hard-drive is going to die soon. Are you using a desktop computer Petteri? Ã,Â You should invest in a new hard-drive (which you'll probably need to do anyways as your current hard-drive may completely die on you anytime). Ã,Â

Install the new Hard Drive (disconnect the old hard drive for now while doing this process). Along with most new hard-drive is a setup/format disk that the Hard-Drive manufaturer usually supplies along with the Hard-Drive you can do a clean format of your new hard drive, or if your have your Windows CD, pop it into the CD drive, and when booting up, the Windows setup should load from the CD and give you the option to format the new hard-drive as well as installing WIndows.

Once this is done, power everything down again, then, having your new hard drive set as the Master and your old Hard Drive set at the Slave (you will find Jumper Pins on the hard drives to adjust those setting), and plug both hard-drives into the HD Ribbon.

Now when booting up, your new hard-drive will be the Master, and windows should also see your old hard-drive as the slave (So Master hard-drive would probably be the C: drive and the slave would probably be the D: drive). Now, if all is connecting and working okay, you can simply copy over important data/files from the old Slave hard-drive, onto your new Master hard-drive.

You should consider doing something like this soon before your old hard drive dies completely.

Other alternatives might be to invest in a CD Read/Writer in which you can copy some of your important files to CD. You could also perhaps invest in an External USB Hard Drive and copy over all of your important files onto that as well.

Well, just giving you a couple of ideas to consider when if it comes down to needing to backup your important files and installing a new Hard Drive. It's never really a "fun" process, but sometimes computer hardware fails, then it's nice to have taken the proper precations and steps to have your important files backed-up. Ã,Â Good luck.

Pet Terry · Tue 07/09/2004 14:04:59

Thanks for the tips, everyone. I think I have come up with a plan. I'm probably going to buy a whole new PC because the one I'm using now is almost 6 years old. I just have to do it sometime. I was going to invest some money to a laptop, but I guess I have scrap that idea. Luckily I won't have to buy things like new monitor or new cd-rom drive because my current monitor is only a year old and I ordered a new cd-rom drive a week ago because my old one broke.

Anyways, I'll try to send the important files to my friend's computer so he can burn them on a cd. I have loads of stuff on the harddrive, but the most important things (digital photos, AGS stuff, drawings, my own music and some save games from the games) takes about 2GBs. It's just one helluva job to install all the programs and games again, but atleast I get rid of the stuff I won't be needing.

Ishmael · Tue 07/09/2004 18:45:12

Heh, I have ~2GB of important stuff on an old laptop, and I got a new laptop with a DVD writer... I just need to get the stuff from the old one to the new one...

In case you still are troubled by this, I'd go for the new hdd to master suggestion, secondary would be a USB drive, or if you had a second pc, networking them and copying files over that way...