Rebuilding PCs

On Monday, everything was fine with my PC. It was running smoothly and had been since I rebuilt it with new memory, motherboard, and CPU. Matter of fact, I was extremely pleased with it as I had not needed to make any tweaks or be so stringent about updating BIOS or drivers; it was just working and working well.

Tuesday, my buddy Matt and I have a standing engagement to play WoW together for a few hours or until we're tired (and we're both getting old-- that is happening earlier and earlier!!). When I logged in, I had no sound. Odd. When I logged out, my display suddenly flickered and then redisplayed with a green filter over everything. Odder. I rebooted the machine and still didn't have sound. A half an hour of tweaks and fiddling and reboots, I managed to get it working again and we played for awhile together.

That night, after playing, however, my machine started freezing. And I mean freezing. Nothing would work or respond in the least and I had to press the tower power button to restart the machine. Whenever I went into something that involved a download or the network, the freezing seemed to happen very quickly. If I didn't, then I may get longer periods without freezing but, eventually, it would jam up again.

I tried going back to a known-good Restore Point an that worked... for awhile. Then the freezing came back. It seemed to coincide with my machine doing downloads from the Internet and it seemed to correlate with Microsoft hot fixes or installs. But, when I checked the Latest Updates list, nothing was dated on Tuesday. If it was MS causing the issue, then it was a "stealth update" that they didn't want me to know about.

I decided to rebuild over top the existing Windows install first. That is easy and not too time consuming. Maybe some DLLs or Drivers had become corrupted and just needed to be reset. However, after the reinstall the pausing continued. Decided to take it a step further and format the hard drive and reinstall OS and everything from scratch. That would wipe out nearly any Virus, reset all DLLs and Drivers to a clean state, and allow me to start fresh. However, I had only installed the OS and allowed it to start downloading and installing hot fixes when Vista froze again. Lock up.

Discussing the issue with some IT personnel whose opinions I trust, they gave me some suggestions that included maybe the drive was starting to fail or had some glitches. I had tested the drive using Windows scanner, but it did not find any errors, but the drive is about 4 years old and probably could stand to be replaced. Plus, when I upgraded to the new MB, I got one with six SATA ports on it but kept the same hard drive-- so I was using the very slow IDE ports. So I decided what the heck and got a new 320 Gig SATA drive with a 3 gig transfer rate and 16 MB cache. This freed up an IDE port so I could plug back in my old Zip 250 drive again.

Powered up BIOS and it found the drive immediately. Tweaked things so that I could boot from my CD-Rom and install Vista on the new drive and, as of last night, everything seems to be working like a champ again. No freezes or other glitches during large downloads of CoH and WoW files. Installed the virus protection without difficulties. Updated the video drivers with no issues. Installed Office without trouble, as well as AIM, YIM, and Firefox.

However, I did all of this very carefully, creating many Restore Points along the way. And, I also disallowed Windows Vista from downloading and installing any Hot Fixes or other updates from the Internet. I'm still not fully convinced that the trouble wasn't from an update or stealth download. I am going to take it very slowly as I install those updates back onto the OS, again creating as many Restore Points as needed. Hopefully I can get myself to the point where I don't have to touch or tweak anything again for a long time.