My computer is an AMD Athlon 7750+, 2GB RAM, MSI K9AGM-FIH mobo,
Seagate 500GB 7200.12 SATA, no discrete gfx card, Win XP SP3.

Yesterday, a friend asked me to test his wireless internet USB
dongle. I installed the driver in my computer and it told me to
restart. I did, but it took an inordinately long time - several
minutes instead of the usual 40 seconds or so for the desktop to
appear. I could open files and run programs but everything was
sluggish. I uninstalled the driver and restarted again, but there
was no improvement.

What I've done so far:
Ran Check Disk on all partitions in Windows including surface
scan - no error.
Checked all connections for loose contacts. Reseated RAM.
Ran memtest86+ v4.10 from a USB flash drive. No error.
Full-formatted the OS drive (C from DOS and ran Scandisk
including surface scan. No error.
Restored contents of C: from a Ghost backup which includes all
apps and utilities. No change.
Cleared the BIOS. No change.
Changed the PSU with a known good one. No difference.

The surface scan in DOS seemed awfully fast, averaging 1.5GB per
minute (I usually get less than a quarter of that).
Ran scandisk on other partitions. Same blistering speed. No
error.
Ran Partition Magic 8 from DOS and Windows. No error.

For comparison, I ran DOS Scandisk on my son's computer which has
almost identical hardware. Scan speed 'normal', i.e., less than
0.4GB/min.

Scandisk did report once that the size of free space in C: was
wrongly reported. I chose the 'Fix It' option. This also happened
with my son's computer.

I loaded the Ghost backup to a spare hard disk and everything ran
normally, even with the primary HDD connected.

Everest reports normal temperatures, but the +12V rail was shown
as 9.94V. A DMM shows about 12.1V.

Can anyone please suggest something?

Pimpom wrote:
> My computer is an AMD Athlon 7750+, 2GB RAM, MSI K9AGM-FIH
> mobo,
> Seagate 500GB 7200.12 SATA, no discrete gfx card, Win XP SP3.
>
> Yesterday, a friend asked me to test his wireless internet USB
> dongle. I installed the driver in my computer and it told me to
> restart. I did, but it took an inordinately long time - several
> minutes instead of the usual 40 seconds or so for the desktop
> to
> appear. I could open files and run programs but everything was
> sluggish. I uninstalled the driver and restarted again, but
> there
> was no improvement.
>
..............<snipped own post>.............

Never mind. Problem solved.