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What's making my disk thrash in Windows XP?

I have a sick Windows XP laptop; something's making the disk thrash and the entire system is sluggish to unresponsive a few minutes after boot. How do I figure out what is making the disk thrash? Task Manager is fine for finding what's using the CPU or memory, but doesn't show disk I/O.

Details: running Win XP Home, the machine was working fine until a few days ago. I've verified it's not paging because it's out of RAM. There's no scary SMART errors according to DiskCheckup.

When to stop using a hard drive? What rules/software apply?

When having a old hard disk - when should you stop using it ?

I recently got a new 1 TB hard disk, and am left with 3 old hard drives (320 GB, 250GB, 160 GB).

I am now wondering which of them to keep using and for how long.

Assuming some of them have bad sectors, and are over 2 years old (the smaller one, I think, over 4 years old) - what should I do?

What rules/ testing software, apply here?

How to prevent Chrome from refreshing page when viewing source?

When viewing page source in Google Chrome, the browser opens a new tab and basically pastes the URL in with the view-source: prefix. This is undesirable.

As a developer, I may include some diagnostic output that is only visible in the source after submitting a form. When Chrome Refreshes the page to view the source, it makes this information disappear.

Is there anyway to prevent this behavior?

Note: I'm familiar with the "Inspect Element" option. This is just not an adequate stand-in for viewing the raw page source of the exact page you're looking at.

A quick test script

<pre>
  <?= print_r($_POST, true) ?>
</pre>
<form action="" method="post">
  <input id="foo" name="foo" value="bar" />
  <input type="submit" />
</form>

After clicking the submit button, the page shows

Array
(
    [foo] => bar
)

If you view page source, you will see an empty $_POST output

<pre>
Array
(
)
</pre>
<form action="" method="post"> 
  <input id="foo" name="foo" value="bar" /> 
  <input type="submit" /> 
</form> 

Update

Apparently this bug has already been submitted. Sigh...

If anyone knows of a good work around, I'd greatly appreciate it.

How can I determine a computer's specs? [closed]

I have a client who has a computer they want to upgrade. They are unable to tell me the specs of this computer and they're not the type of person I could walk it through with.

Ideally, I'd like to send them an application (or a link to an application) which will generate a report telling me everything I need to know about their hardware and OS. It would have to be very easy to use. Ideally only two or three steps to generate a report.

Any ideas?

Motherboard temperature reaches 124° C?

This is a brand new PC build (only a few days old.) There are plenty of fans in the case, but after a few hours of playing Skyrim, this is what Speccy reports:

My usual motherboard idle temperature is 60° C. This is really scaring me, and isn't something I've diagnosed before. What should I do?

Windows 7 x64 installation freezes on new PC build

Symptoms

While attempting to install Windows 7 (64 bit) on my new PC build, it freezes usually at the point where it is expanding the windows image, but has frozen as early as accepting the licence agreement, and as late as just after the first restart.

My specs are at the bottom of the post.

So far I have tried the following to identify the problem, in rough chronological order:

• Tried different hard drives with different sata cables. Same symptoms. I later used a different computer to install windows on the same hard drive with no problems.
• Tried the RAM in different slots, and tried one RAM stick instead of two. Same symptoms.
• Updated the BIOS to 1.60. Same symptoms.
• Ran Memtest86+ with RAM in dual channel. It passed about 6 times when I left it running overnight.
• Used USB to install windows instead of an optical drive. Same symptoms.
• Change SATA configuration from AHCI to IDE. Same symptoms.
• Tried various different SATA ports. Same symptoms.
• Updated BIOS to 1.70. Same symptoms.
• I saw the RAM did not list my motherboard as being supported even though the motherboard did list the RAM as being supported. So I tried some Kingston DDR3 1333MHz RAM instead. Same symptoms.

Other (possibly) pertinent information

My CPU idles at about 30 °C. I can't tell what it gets to when it's working. When I installed the CPU, the lever which locks the CPU in place took quite a bit of force to pull down. Now I didn't just yank it down without rechecking the CPU was seated properly about 5 times, but it does seems unusual, and I wonder if the CPU was seated badly if I would see these symptoms?

I am out of ideas and don't know how to diagnose any further. I suppose either the motherboard or CPU must be the problem. I am on the verge of taking it to a specialist.

The Question

How should I proceed from here? Is there anything I can rule out as being the source of the symptoms I am seeing?

My Specs

• CPU: Intel i5 3570k
• RAM: G.Skill RipjawsX 8GB kit
• HDD: single 3.5" 500GB SATA or 160GB 2.5" SATA (at different times and sometime together. But no RAID or anything).
• MB: ASRock Extreme4 Z77
• PSU: Silverstone Strider Plus 600W ST60F-P

UPDATE:

I decided to reinstall the CPU to ensure that everything was seated correctly. I was worried because the lever arm which locks the CPU in place took rather more force to press it down than I thought would be necessary. It turns out this is fairly usual. I also found that the thermal paste had spread just over the edge of the CPU (too much). So I cleaned the CPU and heat-sink with methylated spirits and cotton buds, reapplied the thermal paste and put it all back together. The CPU now idles at about 23 °C, that's 7 °C cooler than before.

First time I tried to boot, one of the RAM sticks had come loose (probably from flex of motherboard when plugging power back in). Then when I installed Windows, I got a blue screen with something about accessing protected memory. So I double-checked the RAM was installed correctly (pushed down firmly and checked the plastic holding arms on each side) and tried again. This time, Windows installed without an issue!

However, the desktop froze after a few minutes the first time I logged in. I subsequently ran Windows diagnostics (which I can do now I have installed the OS) and it found no problems.

My next step is to run Prime95, which I believe will very thoroughly check for problems. So even though there is some improvement, my question remains.

UPDATE 2

I ran Prime95 for a while. I didn't get any errors and the computer didn't freeze. Next I tried to install some drivers for the motherboard. This caused a blue screen, and ended up making Windows not able to boot up. So I then tried reinstalling Windows, but it kept freezing again.

Next I tried Ubuntu Live (I used this to create the bootable USB). First time, it wouldn't boot. It kept flashing up something like "Hardware Error Check" and then restarted, and continued repeating until I stopped it. I tested the USB stick on another computer (and it worked), so I tried it again, and it booted up. After a couple of minutes of use, the screen froze. I repeated this one more time to be sure and got the same result.

I also noticed that the CPU temperatures reported in the BIOS monitor were back up to about 30 °C. I'm not sure if this is just due to room temperature or what.

UPDATE 3

This is hopefully the final update. I haven't put it as an answer because I personally don't think it is very decisive. I took my PC to a shop for diagnosis, and they went through the following process:

• seatools (hard drive diagnostics I think). Both drives passed ok.
• reflashed BIOS. Same problem.
• Installed with USB. Worked ok.
• Installed with SATA optical drive successfully.

The overall diagnosis from these guys was that it was most likely a problem with Windows 7 and Ubuntu handling legacy USB3 drivers.

I took the PC home after this and installed each of the motherboard device drivers one by one, ensuring I installed the chipset driver first. I haven't had any problems since then, and I have stress tested with prime95 two or three times.

I am having problems bringing the PC out of sleep. Nothing works; mouse, keyboard or power button. I don't know it that's connected though, since everything else seems to be working fine. However, I haven't tried installing Windows myself since I got it back from the shop.

The sleep problem turned out to be a BIOS setting. I simply needed to allow USB devices to bring the computer out of sleep.

Any way to detect what is disabling the screensaver?

Is there any Windows application out there that will determine what process is preventing the screen saver from becoming active?

How can I quickly diagnose hardware on a Mac?

I'm buying a second-hand iMac tomorrow and the guy's coming to my house to complete the deal.

As is standard, I'd like to check the system and make sure it all works properly before buying.

Is there anything I could run from a flash drive that I could use to test the Mac's hardware?

Extremely slow computer... not sure what to do next

A little over four years ago I built a PC with a Core 2 Quad Q6600 and 4GB of DDR2 800 ram. Not very good by today's standards, but it has served its purpose well.

Recently (within the last two to three weeks) I've been experiencing very strange issues. Most noticeably Chrome tabs crashing on every single page load. Being the new year I decided that a fresh install of Windows (7 x64 Professional) couldn't hurt. I went ahead and reinstalled and everything was going great until a few days ago.

The Chrome issues came back, and I don't remember the last time I used a computer this slow. These are actual times as recorded by a stopwatch:

• Launching Firefox 9 with no extensions installed: 40 seconds before the GUI shows up, nevermind the homepage loading.
• IntelliJ Idea 11: An entire minute for the splash to show up and over an additional 4 minutes 40 seconds for the actual IDE to load. Even more time before the program becomes even remotely usable.

Nothing else is running besides small programs like pidgin. My Asus Transformer is faster and more reliable.

I downloaded the latest version of Ultimate Boot CD and ran Memtest86+. No errors. Whenever I try to run any of the hard drive diagnostic tools it freezes at idle: going to resident fdapm. Googling that shows that other people have that issue as well.

The hard drive is the newest component, as the one I bought with the machine failed. I purchased the new hard drive on March 21, 2011. The hard drive is a 1 TB Western Digital Caviar Blue.

So where do I go from here? To be honest, the whole thing is making me want to get a new computer (with nice things like DDR3, Sandy Bridge, etc). I was going to sell this computer but there is no way I am selling it in its current operating condition.

What does Raw Read Error Rate mean in SSD SMART?

I downloaded trial version of HD Tune Pro and I'm using it to benchmark my hard drives. In Health tab of SSD I found Raw Read Error Rate property. What does this property say about my hard drive?

OCZ tool shows only 114 total ECC and RAISE errors. But what does Data column in HD Tune mean? Why the description says that disk had 89.970.873 read errors? It is new disk. I installed it yesterday and it is passing all diagnostic tests in SeaTools, Performance tests in HD Tune Pro and common check in Chkdsk.

What are Targeted Read Test / SMART Short Self Test? What do failures of them mean?

I have a Dell XPS 420, about 4 years old, out of warranty. Drive C: (and smaller partition as D:) is a Western Digital WD5000AAKS-75YGA0 ATA drive.

Seems to be running well, but the Dell predictive diagnostics say the drive failed a Targeted Read Test and a SMART Short Self Test, but passed all the other Dell tests.

It has done this a couple of months in a row (the tests run monthly...), but the fact that the main hard drive of my PC has these items has me concerned.

What are the "Targeted Red Test" and the "SMART Short Self Test"?
Would these outcomes be addressed by a simple chkdsk /f?

Capturing Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) screen [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate:
PC Blue Screens and then instantly reboots. How do I stop this or find the error later?

Sometimes I get a BSOD screen for a split second and I have no chance to see the cause of it. It also happens when I am not at the computer. The event log doesn't have enough information. Is there a way or tool that captures the screen when it happens so I can look at the cause later.

I already did a memory diagnostics test so that's not the problem.

How-to determine the number of physical CPUs under both Windows and Linux

When running cat /proc/cpuinfo under Linux, a variety information is kicked-back. For example:

> cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor   : 0
vendor_id   : GenuineIntel
cpu family  : 6
model       : 15
model name  : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU            5130  @ 2.00GHz
stepping    : 6
cpu MHz     : 1995.069
cache size  : 4096 KB
physical id : 0
siblings    : 2
core id     : 0
cpu cores   : 2
fpu     : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level : 10
wp      : yes
flags       : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl vmx tm2 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm
bogomips    : 3991.76
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes   : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

processor   : 1
vendor_id   : GenuineIntel
cpu family  : 6
model       : 15
model name  : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU            5130  @ 2.00GHz
stepping    : 6
cpu MHz     : 1995.069
cache size  : 4096 KB
physical id : 3
siblings    : 2
core id     : 0
cpu cores   : 2
fpu     : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level : 10
wp      : yes
flags       : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl vmx tm2 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm
bogomips    : 3989.46
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes   : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

First, what does all of that actually mean? I see I have a processor 0 and processor 1. Does that mean Linux is reporting both cores of the CPU, or, since it is a VM, the two that I happen to have right now (even if they're on physically different CPUs)?

Second, how can I get a similar information dump form the command line in Windows?

Third, is there a way using either platform to determine the number of physical CPUs versus total CPU cores?

PC fails to boot after a knock to the top of its case

I accidentally knocked off a small block of fools' gold on-top of my computer case, but didn't actually hit anything inside (since the case was open), and now the computer is having serious stability issues.

These issues mainly comprise of it refusing to output to my monitor at all, but sometimes it does boot. However:

• Sometimes it hangs at POST when checking the RAM
• Today it booted to the Windows 'starting Windows' animation, then got a BSOD of BAD POOL, with the top inch-or-so of the monitor experiencing a graphics glitch (hundreds of small multicoloured lines across the screen).

I've observed that it usually turns on in a usable state without any crashes for 10-20 minutes after around 3 hours being turned off. Beforehand the computer was in a relatively healthy state, with a small minor issue being the lack of disk space.

I'm certain that the knock caused a short somewhere (perhaps the RAM), but I'm not exactly sure how, as the components are screwed in pretty firmly, and I couldn't make any of the components budge at all when I was pushing in the components and checking that they were in properly.

Perhaps this would be a case for out-of-the-case testing?

Every component except the GPU is under warranty (motherboard, case, RAM, and SSD runs out in December, whereas the GPU ran out a couple of years ago), so I may be able to make a warranty claim for a faulty component. Thing is how do I know which component is faulty? I could send all the components in for RMA, however I do not want to dismantle my watercooling system.

Which component is most likely at fault here? Whilst I realise that my components aren't top-of-the range, the PSU however is a top-of-the-range model, and I don't expect it to be causing the issues here.

CPU: AMD FX4100

RAM: 4GB DDR3 1066MHZ

SSD: 64GB OCZ Agility 3

GPU: Nividia 8800 1GB

PSU: 500W Corsair CX500 Modular PSU

Hiren's Boot CD - HDD Diagnostics

I have a bunch of hard drives which I want to sell, so am wiping them using Hiren's Boot CD. I want to check that the drives are healthy first. Can anyone recommend a tool for this? There are several manufacturer ones on there, but are they specific to that brand?

What should I be looking out for? Is it the SMART monitoring?

Also, how do I access them from the disk on bootup?

Thanks!