Hardware I contributed to my relative's PC problem... again

[Harsky]

So my cousin is into gaming and keeps pestering me to research a graphics card for him to run his games smoothly and still within his budget.

His PC was a 2 year old P4, 1gb RAM, 200gb HDD Packard Bell PC and his old graphics card was a Nvidia 6200.

Without much thought, I just took the money he gave me and bought an Nvidia 8600 card. It worked perfectly... for 4 weeks then suddenly I get a call that somehow his PC is now slowing down to a pitiful crawl and takes ages for anything in his PC to open. I can't say that it's my fault as I explained the problem of putting in something more powerful than his PC can handle but I suppose I have to try and find the answer... and I'm stumped.

Any suggestions as to what the problem could be before he decides to just buy another PC?

 

[Mangofett]

wtf packard bell still exists? last packard bell I seen was a pentium 1

Anyway, its probably a virus.

 

[kellyan95]

Could be the PSU, not enough power

Could be drivers, did you update to newest?

Install all the optional/recommended updates from Windows Update

 

[xcalibur]

defrag the hard drive and run full tests with ad-aware and spybot
i would suggest using perfectdisk 8.0 to also defrag system files
and as a final reccomendation, get him some more ram..

 

[Harsky]

The thing is, it runs far, far too slow to even consider installing programs. The thing is, it was actually working yesterday according to my cousin but I don't that much knowledge to fit a PSU and then figure which wires go where. Actually, I might end up buying the wrong PSU

 

[Mangofett]

Try putting in an old graphics card and see if its still slow.

 

[Harsky]

Try putting in an old graphics card and see if its still slow.

Put his old graphics card in. Still the same problem

 

[kellyan95]

Get a MiniPE or BartPE boot disc, and run antivirus/defrag from it

 

[xcalibur]

The thing is, it runs far, far too slow to even consider installing programs. The thing is, it was actually working yesterday according to my cousin but I don't that much knowledge to fit a PSU and then figure which wires go where. Actually, I might end up buying the wrong PSU

then get atfcleaner
its like a lightweight version of ccleaner and is only a few kb's.
you dont need to install anything and it removes obselete files.

 

[ZeWarrior]

Backup his files and reinstall windows if none of the above work.

 

[enigmaindex]

Check how much space is left on the hard drive. That seems to be the problem, and would explain the sudden slowdown even though its 200gb over 2 years that would fill up. Also go to msconfig and disable all the unnecessary programs from starting up. While your at it Crt+Alt+Delete and see how many processes are running and while your at it again get some more RAM.

 

[Banger]

Format and ram.

 

[Harsky]

The thing is, I formatted the PC the same week I ordered the graphics card and I have no idea how he could fill it up with tons of junk already... oh wait. He loves World of Warcraft and other PC games so I guess that explains it but when I checked, it wasn't even reaching 50gb.

I'd like to take the advice of adding more RAM but I'm worried this will just be a temp solution for something that might happen again.

 

[Psyfira]

The thing is, I formatted the PC the same week I ordered the graphics card and I have no idea how he could fill it up with tons of junk already... oh wait. He loves World of Warcraft and other PC games so I guess that explains it but when I checked, it wasn't even reaching 50gb.

The fact that it's still slow even if you put the old graphics card back in implies that it's not the PSU, and probably completely unrelated to the actual hardware inside the computer. Did you get any software with the new Nvidia card? Maybe some driver-based Nvidia program running on startup is causing a problem (theory being it's still installed and running when the computer starts, even though the old card is back in the system. Something like a memory leak is my personal favourite to bring a system to a crawl *cough*NTLgearbox*cough*). Boot to safe mode (hold F8 while windows boots) and uninstall any software you got with the new card.

Or if you suspect the drive is full pull it, connect it to another PC as a slave and find out how much is on it. Laugh if it's porn.

 

[kellyan95]

Get a MiniPE or BartPE boot disc, and run antivirus/defrag from it

Doesn't need HDD to run, very useful.....

 

[Harsky]

On the advice... I decided to format it (with data backed up of course) and reinstall and it's working well again. I was also given money to buy a 1gb stick of RAM but can RAM prevent something like this happening again.