Urgently need help ... Need software to diagnose my motherboard/GPU..

Status
Not open for further replies.

ahmadka

Distinguished
May 29, 2008
34
0
18,530
About 5-6 days ago from now, my PC started running into some very peculiar problems ... The problems started off with small-scale software related issues, but then got bigger from there on .. Here is a timeline on how things started happening:

1) It all started with a system restart: At one moment everything was fine, and then I think because of something, I needed to simply restart my PC .. No biggie, so I just told my PC to restart. However, even the PC restarted, it immediately became *very* slow !! I mean, once it went into Windows, it used to get stuck even when I just single-clicked on an icon on the desktop ... ! I thought that it was probably some virus ..

2) About the same time as above, I noticed that my chipset fan broken down ... Stopped spinning .. I am in the process of ordering an Evercool VC-RE for it right now, but for the time being, I have made some adjustments to the existing fan, and its running again (although very noisy)

3) After another 1-2 days, Windows just stopped loading properly! I could not reach the Desktop stage. It always got stuck during some stage of the Windows starting process. Sometimes it got stuck right after choosing the OS from the OS Selection boot menu, and sometimes it got stuck at the Windows's Welcome message .. ! For situations like these, I have always had a backup Windows XP installed as well, which I never used at all ! The idea was to only use them in extreme circumstances, when emergency things need to be done ... Even this Windows stopped booting! Now I knew it was something serious ..

4) To try and format my PC, I tried re-installing Windows XP from boot time .. But when the setup tried to format my drives, it used to hang !! Then it said that my hard drive is probably damaged !!

5) Then, the graphics display of my computer started going a little weird. Weird because during boot time, all the letters/words printed on the screen or normally white, right ? ... Well my problem was that some letters were coloured, while the remaining stayed white ... Thats weird right ... ? Random coloured letters ..?

My troubleshooting so far about all this is listed now:

1) I have taken out the hard drive which is 'reported' to be having problems, and I have plugged it in another PC of mine. I have run some tested on it, and it seems to be fine. I got the Western Digital Diagnosis tool and run both the Quick and Full Surface tests on it. Both tests reported that the hard drive is fine ! Then why was the problematic PC reporting that there are problems with it ?? ...... I am running Spinrite on it right now (at Level 4), and even that test is running fine so far ..

2) To check whether there's some problem with the memory modules, I ran memtest for like 5 hours. Tests 5 and 8 were run about 13-14 times each, and then the rest of the tests for about 3-4 hours ... No errors anywhere ..

So this leads me to believe that maybe the problem is with the motherboard and probably the GPU as well (eVGA 7900GT OC) ...

So I need some software which can probably 'check' for problems in the motherboard and the GPU ...

I know the PC's specs are probably a bit outdated now, but I was still planning to use this rig for at least another 2 years, without any major changes/upgrades ... So bringing this PC back to health is very important to me :)

Need some expert advice on all this please .... :) .. I'm very confused :p
 

bpjb81

Distinguished
Jan 30, 2009
25
0
18,530
I doubt its the Video Card. You say you have another PC, I would try installing the hard drive in the other PC and boot to windows and see if you are having the same issues. If no issues are apparent then it most likely is the MB. What brand model MB do you have?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.