Help! takes forever to boot; restarts wrong

[Nemmyy]

Well if you vacuumed the fans while they were plugged into your other hardware and let them spin, it can send electricity through them and damage your parts or something like that.
Use that power supply calculator to see if maybe that's the problem

[redotter]

okay how about this: if i remove one of my RAM modules, the computer seems to want to boot up, but of course Vista can't work around a missing RAM module and it just sits there with a black screen... could bad RAM do this?

[Nemmyy]

I have no idea...maybe? Try using different RAM if you can find any.

[Dexdrex007]

actually like i said already it is the hard drive, a bad hard drive can be a reason of bios freezing, because the bios can't read the hard disk properly. like i said you already got your hint that when the bios freeze or hangs your hard disk become noisy, it means that the bios is forcing the hard drive to be read. this already happened to me 3 times on my customer's computer.

[redotter]

actually like i said already it is the hard drive, a bad hard drive can be a reason of bios freezing, because the bios can't read the hard disk properly. like i said you already got your hint that when the bios freeze or hangs your hard disk become noisy, it means that the bios is forcing the hard drive to be read. this already happened to me 3 times on my customer's computer.

fair enough thank you for your help... any chance Vista can repair the damaged sectors or is it just time to pitch it?

[Dexdrex007]

no actually like i said HDD Regenerator can, but in your case the chances of revival of you HDD is 30% because the bios already have already trouble reading it.

[redotter]

alright then i guess i'm off to get another one. thank you so much for the input. i'll update this to let everyone know what happens...

[redotter]

ya... it wasn't the hard drive. the new one does the exact same thing. thanks

[Nemmyy]

ya... it wasn't the hard drive. the new one does the exact same thing. thanks

Did you use the PSU calculator to see where you stand with that?

[redotter]

Ya it looks like my system requires around 270w out of my 430w unit...

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So at this point, in my less-than-two-year-old machine, I have reinstalled Vista, cleaned and reseated every connection, and replaced the hard drive. I have removed each component to check if that was screwing with things. As far as I can tell, I am not over-exerting my PSU. My motherboard does not show any signs of overheating, such as bulged capacitors.

Here is a magical youtube video of it asking for me to kill it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-eytxvXbSo

Thank you for any help!