psu possibly overloaded, extremely slow booting

I've got a bunch of problems that seem to have stemmed from an overloaded PSU, so here's the story.

I was running my PC off a Cooler Master 460 that's about 3 years old. Occasionally it would shut down unexpectedly while playing Borderlands 2, usually after 20 minutes of play time. I suspected an overheating issue at first, so when it shut down I would open the case and dust everything out with canned air - the CPU heatsink, all the other heatsinks, my GeForce GTX 550ti, and then some air through the PSU. I would wait several hours before attempting to reboot, and upon rebooting, the computer would sometimes take up to an hour to get to the desktop. Once there and everything was finished starting up, it ran fine, and I would reboot properly and everything would be dandy. My case fan is on its last legs, so I am currently running an open case because airflow through the machine was terrible. This seemed to help as long as I kept it dusted out, until just recently. It would shut down unexpectedly more often, and while doing less power-intensive things, specifically while playing a heavily modded version of Minecraft. It happened twice in one day, and the second time it took four hours to finally boot, but again it was the same - after initial boot it seemed fine and ran normally. I played about 15 minutes of borderlands again, and as I was closing the game, the PSU exploded. Sounded like firecrackers going off and everything went dead. It seems like a premature death for a PSU, but I had an underpowered backup that I was able to install and I got the machine running again. As far as I can tell, the PSU failure did not cause any damage to the motherboard or any other components.

Now I'm having similar trouble with my backup PSU. It shut down on me while playing borderlands again, but I'm pretty sure that was my stupidity for running a mid-level GPU on a severely underpowered PSU. I'm fairly certain it just overloaded, but I gave it time to cool off anyway in case it was an overheat. I have now downgraded to a GeForce 210 to limit power consumption, but now the computer is extremely slow all the time.

My question is this: can the PSU be causing such a massive slow down? It takes up to 30 minutes to get to the desktop and once all the startup programs are running it is still extremely slow.

Specs: AMD Athalon 64 x2 3200+; Gigabyte mobo (do not remember model); 5GB of DDR2 RAM (2x2GB and 2x512MB); two 500GB SATA HDDs. No other peripherals are currently plugged in.

sounds like the windows files got a bit corrupt when it shut off?

go to CMD (start and type CMD then right click and run as admin) and type:

sfc /scannow

that may or may not fix your issue, but I hope it helps you!

My question is this: can the PSU be causing such a massive slow down? It takes up to 30 minutes to get to the desktop and once all the startup programs are running it is still extremely slow.

No.

Odds are you have issues with software, startup programs. Have you run any AV programs?

madcratebuilder said:

No.

Odds are you have issues with software, startup programs. Have you run any AV programs?

Nothing other than a scheduled scan with MSE. I'm going to go with ganon11000's suggestion of a system scan first. I've got it running now, I'll let you all know how it goes.

After an entire 24 hours of scanning, I got the message "Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity issues."

Since that is now done, I'm going to scan my system with Malwarebytes and MSE. I'll report back in a couple of days when they are finished because wow these are going to take a long time.

No malware, no viruses, no corrupted system files. After scanning my machine it seems to be running closer to normal, but it's still extremely slow to boot up. Anyone have any other ideas for what the problem might be?

I am going to replace the PSU in the next few days (a friend is mailing me a slightly bigger one) because this one does not have the 24-pin mobo power connector, it only has the 20-pin. In fact, the only other connectors the PSU has is the 4-pin CPU power and four peripheral connectors. I've got peripheral -> SATA adapters on two of them for my HDDs.

You said your case fan was going out. Did you make sure and unplug it? it could be causing a short or drawing lots of power. also check and recheck all your cable ends and make sure all your devices are plugged in properly. You should be able to see in your bios the current state of voltages being supplied to some power rails, and at last try plugging in to a different wall socket they go bad too you know.

Good luck!

Unplugging the case fan made no difference at all. I checked the BIOS for voltage information and it did not give me specifics, all it said was the 3.3V and 12V rails were "OK". There was no other info I could get from the BIOS. Rebooting this time was particularly difficult - it took me 4 reboots just to get the machine to the desktop, and 3 of those times the desktop didn't load properly so I logged out and back in and that seemed to load my startup items properly and all that.

I should probably note that twice since the MSE scan my computer has popped up with a warning about a particular .rar archive that contained a file that had a keylogger in it. The first time I attempted to delete the archive with MSE and it took a long time and ultimately said it was successful. I rebooted after I reinstalled my Nvidia display drivers and MSE popped up again with the same file, so I attempted to quarantine it instead. It claimed it was successful and I went on with my day. Since I got the machine running after this last reboot attempt, Resource Monitor shows me that this file was being constantly read by the System process. It finally showed up with the MSE popup and I just ignored MSE and deleted the file completely.

All that happened this morning. I was interrupted in the middle of typing this post by my wife's car breaking down on the freeway. As of now it is still running rather slowly, i.e. taking much longer than usual to open programs or even display contents of folders.

The new PSU has not alleviated the aggravating slowness. If anything, it seems to have gotten worse. All programs are taking upwards of 10 minutes to load, and equally long to close when I'm finished with them. I am starting to think there is either a problem with my page file or a problem with the C: drive itself. As I cannot afford a replacement drive at this time, I am attempting to move the page file to my D: drive and only leaving a small page file on the C: drive.

Minecraft is the main game I play on my computer and the problems it is having also lead me to believe there is a hard drive problem. The modded version runs off my D: drive and has occasional lag spikes, but trying to run a modded copy of vanilla from the C: drive (the default drive Minecraft uses) causes lag spikes so terrible my server connection is timing out after a few seconds of playing.

What program can I use to benchmark test the HDD to determine if there is indeed a problem with it?

you will want to use minitool partition wizard and do a surface test