You hit both of my preliminary guesses on the head.  The only other thing that comes to mind is an ongoing disk failure which has corrupted the OS.  Are you hearing the "click of death" or getting any other indicator of a progressive hard drive failure?

I've got spare drives laying around if you want to try installing an OS on a different drive.  That should give you an idea of where the problem lies and will rule out memory and other hardware problems.  Once you get that carved out, you can connect the second drive to determine if it is a drive failure or a virus.


-b0b
(...!)

I suggest running a system restore from the installation media.  If you boot to the install CD and go to install there should be a setting there to repair.  Depending on what version of windows you are using, the exact steps are going to vary.  Once done you will have to reload any drivers that you may have installed. 

Another idea is to reseed the memory with only one stick in at a time. Maybe a stick is bad.   

Not sure if you are using a OEM machine or not, but dell has a decent diagnotic live cd that is worth trying.  HP has one too I believe.

Quote:



And realer men look to see which partition they are formatting before they do it.  I told you I would never let you forget about that!


...and 'C' does not sound that much like 'D'!!!

You overworked whore!  It went...

Quote:


That is what I said!

So I'm thinking of building my computer again from scratch.  The problem is, that being out of the loop for a bit leads to not knowing what's current and what the future holds.

So does anyone have any suggestions for motherboard, processor, graphic card, and/or anything else that might be helpful?

Heck, I don't even know what case to buy!

X

Real Men™ buy their cases from Mountain Mods.  The next Bobulator is going to require a new case (*tear*) because of the way the power supply is mounted in the existing case, and I'm looking at the Ascension Duality.  Check it out.

For what its worth, every time I plan a PC upgrade I have to spend a fair amount of time researching the latest hardware.  I can tell you anything you want to know about server and network gear at any time, but it's just too hard to keep up with PC trends when you aren't building a machine every week.


-b0b
(...shrugs.)

At the moment, Intel is still higher up the ladder than AMD, but the gap is much narrower than it once was.  I'm running an Intel Q6600 at the moment and I'm looking at upgrading to an i7 within the next few months.  If you're concerned about price, though, AMD is making some great chips at an incredible price point.

ATI and Nvidia are really running neck and neck right now, and the "winner" really depends on which price category you're looking at.  ATI is winning at the top-of-the-line category with the Radeon 5870, which is the current king of the speed race and also the only DirectX 11 card on the market.  It's also $600+ and insanely hard to find in stock anywhere.  Nvidia is still holding their own, though, and generally have superior cards at all other price points.

Personally, I've had bad luck with ATI cards for years, so I'm still going to stick with Nvidia.  The GTX 285 line is reasonably priced and a heck of a performer, so that's the board I'm planning on buying during the next Bobulator refresh.

Now that Soyo has gone down the crapper, I've become an Asus enthusiast.  I'm currently running the Asus Maximus Extreme, and I'm looking at the Asus Supercomputer for my next board.  You really can't go wrong with their high-end boards, as they ship with everything but the kitchen sink.  The board I have now has an integrated power button and reset switch right on the board, for crying out loud!


-b0b
(...needs more power!)

Depending on the video setup you go for, you can burn up 3-4 PCI slots simply on graphics adapters.

Alternately, you could buy six 4-port server-grade gigabit network adapters and team them together for a 24GB network connection.


-b0b
(...alright, that might be overkill.)