HTPC has gone herky jerky

[jfenwick]

So I need to bounce this off someone, I put space chimps on last night for the kidos and it worked fine. Shut it down when it was done but when I booted it up this morning it hung during Windows load up at a black screen. No big deal, I did a force shut down and re-booted it. It wanted to do windows scan/repair and since it didn't detect my wireless usb keyboard i couldn't change it's mind. After sitting in the scan screen for 45min I gave up and cancelled the repair and had it reboot.

It booted back up but took a good 2-3 minutes to do it. Every stage of the windows load was longer than usual. Including the start up programs like skype. I didn't think too much of and put on how to train your dragon for the kido who's home sick today and every 6-7 seconds or so it freezes, almost like its lagging. Here are the specs:

-Crosair 450hx
- 4GB corsair ram
- AMD X2 5000+
- evga 9800gt
- Gigabyte AM2+ mobo
- Corsair black 500gb HDD

Nothing is overclocked and there has never been an issue lagging media on this before, am running 7 64bit. Something else of note, it reset my clock to May of 2000 for some reason. I've rebooted a few times now and it is always taking way longer that it should to boot and the lag continues in various movies i try. In task manager the system resources register as barely in use.

What I've done so far: clear CMOS, check temps, and am now running memtest. If the memory passes I don't know what else it could be other than either a hard driver or system problem....any ideas that I might be missing?

 

[MindoverMaster]

Could just be a HDD corruption. Run diagnostics provided by your HDD manufacturer, Corsair.

 

[jfenwick]

Yeah, that was my next place to stop, and turns out it's a seagate 500gb and not a corsair. I know seagate had issues with their 500gb 7200.11 HDDs so that might be it. But i think this might actually be a replacement seagate drive from a previous one. I'll have to check my records and seatools.

Side note, I re-insalled vlc and that seems to have helped. It's playing right now, and it had one jerk about 5 min in but nothing since. I'll see what the boy says at the end of the movie.

Thanks for the reply

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

I have had the 6-7 second freezes before, and it was caused by VNC being active among a corrupted memory stick that VLC was trying to play the video file from.

Run a full chkdsk /r, and run memtest on your memory, corrupt memory early on can cause jittering, and odd behavior such as this. But so can a lot of other things.

 

[jfenwick]

Once I checked that the system resources weren't being taxed I figured it was memory as my first guess but after a couple of hours on memtest nothing came up. According my son it ran smooth the rest of the film after that one hickup...not sure if i trust him though, he's 6 and tends to get lost in his movies. my wife and i will watch some house tonight and see if it causes any problems.