Help troubleshot problem from power surge

[Guest]

We had a power outage two days ago and I didn't unplug my computer before the power came back on. I had just finished building a new i5 HTPC the week before and it now has serious problems. The computer will bootup and load windows7 login screen but it takes around 6 hours. When the screen comes up that says boot in safe mode or normal mode and has the 30 second countdown each second takes around 5-10 minutes to change. It is like everything is working but happening so slow that no input from a keyboard or mouse is ever registered. Is this something like the cache on my CPU got messed up, the memory or the motherboard? My guess was that I need to replace the CPU but before I drop another $200 I thought I would see if anyone had any better ideas. I can't run any diagnostics since it is running too slow and I can't remote desktop into it for the same reason. Help! Thanks!

Bill

 

[dextermat]

first id look in bios to see what i detect: you could try resetting the bios.

if everything is ok there, id try installing win7 on another hard drive or Windows ultimate boot cd....

good luck

 

[Guest]

Thanks. It wouldn't let me access the bios as it never saw the keypress but I just tried pulling one of the sticks of ram to see if that might be the problem. The first stick I pulled didn't change anything so I put it back and pulled the other. That seems to have done the trick so it must be a bad stick of ram.

Bill