Halp. System lag/lockup.

[Wintermute]

Last few weeks my system's been giving me headaches.

I kept running into a problem where the system would lockup/crash when playing WoW. Sometimes it just crashes to a black screen, other times it freezes and the sound loops. I copied the directory from an older system so I thought it was a corrupt file or some such but even after a fresh install it's still acting up.

The other issue was MSN. It would run in the background and I could chat no problem but if I tried to open the main contacts window it would lag out the system like fuck until it finally popped up. Recently it's been getting worse and worse.

Last night it all but locked up the machine after taking about 30 seconds to load up the window so I restarted it and went to bed. Cleaned out the thing this morning using compressed air, set the system back up, and now it refuses to load anything.

Two boots didn't get to windows, one claimed it had been shut down improperly, and all the others that did get to the desktop could not load shit. I could mouse over for tooltips, open the start menu, but when I tried to actually open anything it just stops. The mouse still moves, and the HDD access light stays on but nothing happens. Did manage to open task manager and the CPU Usage drops to 0 when I try to open anything at all.

I think my HDD might be dying, though I've not got any other SATA HDD handy barring my PS3 one so I hope that's not the case.

BIOS shows that nothing is overheating, currently running a Memtest from the Xubuntu Boot CD, once that's done I'm seeing if I can access the HDD through Linux to salvage shit before I format, and I've got Ultimate Boot CD downloading for other tests.


Anyone have any other suggestions on what the problem could be and what tests I could run to figure out what the hell is going on?

EDIT:
Xubuntu can't see my HDD, but it sees my NTFS external. Seems to work fine in Windows safe mode.

[Lhyet]

Could be a problem with the memory... when you right click and press properties on My Computer, how much memory (RAM) does it say? How much should there be?

[Dramafinderftw]

Could be a problem with the memory... when you right click and press properties on My Computer, how much memory (RAM) does it say? How much should there be?

I had a similar problem and this was my issue, I had to buy a ram stick.

[Cephius]

Run memtest86+ to test the memory. If that checks out, I'd try loading into the Recovery Console from a windows CD, and doing a chkdsk /r to see if there are any errors on the drive. It may let you boot up again after that, but you're probably going to want to back up your stuff and get a new drive.

[Wintermute]

Managed to fix it up with a Disk Checker from the Ultimate Boot CD. Turns out I had about 80 errors on the HDD which was cocking everything up.

Quick repair and a fresh format and seems to be working now. Cheers for suggestions.