I’m actually trying to see if others concur with my diagnosis.
I’ve got a client who came to me today with her computer – 1 year old Gateway running XP Home, it’s been locking up more and more (don’t know exactly how long) and then she kind off-handedly mentioned that when she shuts it down by pulling out the plug, it seemed hot.
I checked and sure enough the power supply fan was not working. So I replaced the power supply. However, after a reboot I decided to run Norton Anti-Virus. It gets about 2/3 through and the computer locks up completely. The last time it did this, after it had been on for a few hours, it wouldn’t even reboot. I just rebooted after it had been off for 1-1/2 hours and it’s fine.
I’m thinking that the fan hadn’t been working for some time and that now the hard drive is heat damaged, such that when it works hard (like in Norton), it fails. I’m thinking that if this is correct I’m going to tell her to get a new drive and I’ll Ghost it over.
But before we go to that expense – any other ideas of what could be causing it?