Time (now out of business) Box, 1.3 G AMD Athlon processor, 512 M RAM on
American Megatrends MB. 40 g HDD, CD/DVD ROM drive, CDRW drive. 5 years old.
Printer, Scanner, card reader/writer, additional USB hub, Ethernet PCI card
to connect my cable modem

Replaced the MB battery which cured clock problems (date resetting to
07/02/2036 occasionally) and installed new Soundblaster PCI card after the
OEM "on board" sound died. However recently I have noticed a couple of
oddities.

1 When performing eg AVG disk scan or defrag, I can occasionally hear a
"ticking" sound at about 1hz (from the HD?) and the computer "hangs" for a
while then restarts the application.

2 Occasionally, after an apparantly normal shut down, on next re booting,
the computer runs scandisk with the "improper shut down" message. However
scandisk is in the full test mode and never completes more than 3 bars.
Scandisk in DOS from boot floppy runs through and reports no problems.
Normal re boot runs into scandisk in full test mode again .... The way I
have got over this is to re boot in safe mode, let sd go through the file
structure test, test some 28,000 sectors, start testing some 2,000,000
sectors and then kill sd and run Maintenance Wizard. This seems to "cure"
this problem.

3 When accessing data from CD (drive D) occasionally, there is a noise
(sounds a bit like a 1.44meg floppy "seeking") and the application may abort
or hang for a few seconds then continue.

4 When there is not a heatwave, on booting, the PSU fan is noisy until all
warms up. then it is quiet. (been doing this for 3? years, likely to
continue for another 3?)

Sorry to be so verbose. Questions; is it likely that 1 & 2 are indicative of
a failing HD? Is it likely that 3 is indicative of a CD/DVD ROM drive
failing (and/or HD)? IYOs is it worth replacing HDD, replace CD/DVD ROM,
replace CD-RW with a DVD-RW, replace PSU? OR Hope it hangs on for another
few months and replace with a new Vista box? OR replace right away with a
new XP box?

Any opinions out there O Gurus? If replacement is recommended, what
processor? (Pentium dual core, Athlon?) Memory? (1 M at least?) OS (XP or
Vista?) Any other goodies (LCD screen?) ...

TIA

--
Delboy

A common mistake that people made when trying to design something completely
foolproof was to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

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