Strange windows problem

kc66

Dell Dimension 5100, windows 7 Ultimate. A bit of background- last week the PC started freezing, only disconnecting power and restarting could get out of it. When it froze, the cursor still moved, if there was a song playing it would play till the end but would not go to the next track. So there was still something working, but nothing could be clicked on. I did a system restore which completed "successfully". But then it would not go past the Welcome screen at login- just hung.
So I reinstalled Win 7 without formatting the drive. Worked fine all day yesterday, many reboots for updates etc. But today it is back to hanging at the Welcome screen. No hardware/software was added, except for print driver which worked no problem before.
Any ideas what is happening?

yoyo

kc66 wrote: »

Dell Dimension 5100, windows 7 Ultimate. A bit of background- last week the PC started freezing, only disconnecting power and restarting could get out of it. When it froze, the cursor still moved, if there was a song playing it would play till the end but would not go to the next track. So there was still something working, but nothing could be clicked on. I did a system restore which completed "successfully". But then it would not go past the Welcome screen at login- just hung.
So I reinstalled Win 7 without formatting the drive. Worked fine all day yesterday, many reboots for updates etc. But today it is back to hanging at the Welcome screen. No hardware/software was added, except for print driver which worked no problem before.
Any ideas what is happening?

Try running a memory test (download the Memtest86 iso and burn to a CD, then boot off it and run it).
Could also be a hard drive problem, run a diagnostics of the drive (Download Seatools for DOS and burn it to CD/boot off it like with memtest), in Seatools (even if you dont have a seagate/maxtor drive it should work well) do a quick scan, if that passes a long scan.
If any errors appear the drive is knackered and should be replaced

Nick

kc66

yoyo wrote: »

kc66 wrote: »

Dell Dimension 5100, windows 7 Ultimate. A bit of background- last week the PC started freezing, only disconnecting power and restarting could get out of it. When it froze, the cursor still moved, if there was a song playing it would play till the end but would not go to the next track. So there was still something working, but nothing could be clicked on. I did a system restore which completed "successfully". But then it would not go past the Welcome screen at login- just hung.
So I reinstalled Win 7 without formatting the drive. Worked fine all day yesterday, many reboots for updates etc. But today it is back to hanging at the Welcome screen. No hardware/software was added, except for print driver which worked no problem before.
Any ideas what is happening?

Try running a memory test (download the Memtest86 iso and burn to a CD, then boot off it and run it).
Could also be a hard drive problem, run a diagnostics of the drive (Download Seatools for DOS and burn it to CD/boot off it like with memtest), in Seatools (even if you dont have a seagate/maxtor drive it should work well) do a quick scan, if that passes a long scan.
If any errors appear the drive is knackered and should be replaced

Nick

Thanks for reply. Memtest was clear. Seatools found some problems. Not much detail given. There was a mention of bad sectors. Is something like chkdsk /r still useful?

yoyo

kc66 wrote: »

Thanks for reply. Memtest was clear. Seatools found some problems. Not much detail given. There was a mention of bad sectors. Is something like chkdsk /r still useful?

The hard drive is f*cked more than likely, backup all you can and get a new one, should solve all your problems, failing hard drives can show symptoms like you describe, you may find a windows reinstall last a week/day/hour and suddenly can't boot or even access files on the drive using another drive with OS loaded,

Nick