Help..On a old Machine Running WinXP.....

[cmgray74]

Hi all,
I built a machine just before I graduated from college (BS - CS major
8/98). The motherboard is a Tyan Tiger (Dual Processor - Currently only
has a single 733MHz PIII processor - slot one in it), has I believe
512 megs of ram(will have to check when I get home but more then likely
it is more), 40 GIg HD, 32 Matrox G400, Network card, CDRW Drive, DVD
Drive and its currently running WinXP Pro.

This machine was my main machine up to about a year or so ago, as I
started using my faster newer laptop, and it basically got set aside
and used occasionally. Well I recently moved and was setting up my
office and I went to boot it up and it takes a incredibly long time to
load. I am not talking 10 minutes to load. I am talking (no joke I did
this) I can take a shower and get dressed and its still not fully
loaded. The windows screen is there but not ready to be used. It will
load, I have left it sit and run a while, while I was at work. When its
up and running the mouse icon and everything seems to function normally
but to address any kind of files and such, forget it, it takes a few
minutes (no joke) to open just a folder with 2 files in it.

So my delima, this machine has a few files that I need to get off it,
nothing super life and death as I back up occasionally. I have a
external DVD and a 120 Gig HD, so I am going to try and remove the
necessary files and quaranteen them just in case its not a hardware
issue. Replace a drive with one I have laying around and see it that
changes anything.

The machine seems to come up fine, no post beeps, the only thing I hear
every few minutes is a beeping noise coming from the Hard drive, so I
am pretty sure the HD going out, just the reason for long file access.

I plan to put Dual 933 MHz or 1 GHz in the machine and max out the
memory for a play box but I am unsure if I should proceed or just
replace.

So my questions;

1) Has anyone seen this kind of scenario before?

2) How would you go about diagnosing/troubleshooting this kind of
issue?

3) If it is not the hard drive what parts can I say are most likely
good?

4) Crazy question- Would a power supply do this? The one in this unit
seems to work fine but I am grasping at straws here.


Thanks for the help,
Chris
SolomonMan

 

[JS]

If the computer has been off for about a year, then it might be Windows
Indexing service sees everything as not having been indexed or stale data.
Turn off this service and see if you get your speed back after the PC boots.
As to the slow boot, can't answer that but is you think the hard drive is
going south ....

JS