Win7 Has Gone Crazy

seekermeister said:

When I had things go haywire in a similar fashion on one of my machines recently, I found that the cause was bad installation of the CPU. Actually, it wasn't the CPU itself, but the cooler that I had used. It came with a used CPU that I had bought recently, and though it wasn't visually apparent, the mating surface on it was very concaved, so much so that even with thermal paste it didn't make full contact with the CPU, and the high temp that it ran at caused data corruption on the harddrive, requiring a fresh install of the OS.

It doesn't sound likely that your computer would be suffering the same malady, otherwise you probably would have noted the temp behavior yourself, but I'm just tossing this into the hat to widen the perspective to possibilities that a repair or reinstall might not cure.

Thanks but this is on a company laptop that I've been using for a few years now.

Hot dang!! After 35 minutes, it moved up to 6%. At this rate, should only take me about 9 hours to get through this step. WTF happened to my machine!?!?

Just an update on the situation here. Aside from about an hour where I had to put the PC into sleep mode, its been running non-stop since the last post, about 9 hours so far, and I'm to 45% on the "Gathering files, settings and programs" step. Doesn't look like I'm going to find the fix, but just want to give updates incase someone else encounters this.

Well, repair install didn't fix it. Not quite as slow as before, but still pretty slow and the memory issues are still there. And now the DHCP seems to be hosed as I couldn't connect to wired or wireless networks. I manually configured the IP info for the wired connection and it does work though. At this point, I'm just going to do a clean install and pray that all is well after that.