Hello MMO-Champion Community =]
Alright, so about a year ago I was defragging my hard drive. The power went out. I tried to reboot my computer, but after leaving it on for a while it didn't really do anything. So I booted from my Windows 7 disk, wiped the hard drive, and ran a clean install.
I thought that this would fix the problem, but the power outage must have caused some hardware damage. My computer now sits at the BIOS screen when first turned on for about 5 mins. At the BIOS screen it shows the processor right away, and then freezes taking several minutes to display the RAM. After finally displaying the RAM it boots up normally. The whole boot up process went from about ~1 minute to ~5 minutes after the outage.
When I am logged in the computer runs some applications fine, and others are very slow to respond. Disk Defragmenter takes about 15 minutes to load, iTunes is really slow too. I can't run a anti-virus like Norton without the computer becoming unusably slow and unresponsive. I am careful where I go on the interwebs though, and run Malwarebytes daily. I can run WoW just fine, and Starcraft II runs well considering my system specifications.
The computer randomly ran like new or before the outage for about a week, but then went back to it's slow sluggish ways. I also tried booting with 1 stick of RAM at a time to try and find a dead stick (I have 4x 1GB). I thought I had found one so I removed it. It ran fine for about a week with 3GB of RAM, but then went back to being sluggish.
I have upgraded the PSU, graphics card, and added 2GB of RAM since I bought the system. These upgrades were all pre-outage. So I know a bit about computer stuff, or at least I think lol. I am trying to figure out how I can get the system to run as well as it did originally. I have considered replacing all the RAM, motherboard, and hard drive. I don't really have the funds to upgrade to a new system right now. If any computer gurus out there could help me out it would be much appreciated. =]
(P.S. sorry for the long post, but I tried to include as much info as possible)