I'm pretty much at an intermediate level when it comes to working on PC's. I've had a couple of problems with my machine before, but this one has me kind of stumped.
You see, I woke up one morning having left it on during the night to finish downloading a torrent, only to find that it had completely frozen. It was stuck on the page of the site I was on and the mouse and keyboard were not responding.
The only thing I could do was reset it, but now it freezes at random times during the boot process. My PC is dual boot, with two copies of windows each installed on it's own hard drive. However, the problem persists regardless of which one I try to start up.
I attempted to run the recovery console from the XP installation disk, but that also froze a few seconds into the process of loading up the disk. When I tried to run a copy of Knoppix 3.6 that I have off a live CD, the same thing happened.
I've tried resetting the CMOS with the jumper, I've changed the battery (just in case), I tried starting it up after disconnecting RAM and excess hardware, but so far nothing has worked. I managed to get it to actually log me into windows under safe mode once (out of about seven tries, the other times also froze half way through), but I didn't have enough time to do a scan for malware. However, I did get to check around and all my data seems intact.
So yeah, that's kinda where I'm at right now. I don't know why it freezes at such random points either. It's frozen during the POST, during the Windows loading animation, at the login screen.... pretty much everywhere to be honest. Even while I was in the CMOS settings.
So if anyone has any ideas, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks.