I have a machine (<1yr old) that has begun to run slower than normal. It also has started having booting problems. When i elect to restart, it shuts down (fans still running)but never recieves a signal to start back up. I have to cut the power off at the strip to get it to turn back on. Sometimes it will start right back up, and sometimes i have to hit the power button 2 or 3 times for it to start. when it does start, it takes forever to fully load. I tried to defrag and it stayed at 1% forever so i canceled it. There is not a whole lot on this computer, maybe 3gigs on the 30gig HD. When i first built the computer about 8 months ago i installed XP (copied version)and it ran fine. For the past month it has started running alot slower; during boot-up, on the internet, or just playing games. Did virus check and it is clean. I formated the HD and re-installed XP. The format went smoothly. Everything seemed fine for about a week and then it started doing all the same symptons again. I suspected a bad install of Windows XP (copied version) so i decided to format again and put win98 back on. I removed all the extra periphials (printer, cable modem..) before starting the format. I started the format 3 hours ago and it is only at 27%. Its not froze, its just very slow now at foramtting. Any ideas on what the problem might be? Here are my specs: MB: Gigabyte GA-7VAX CPU: AMD 1800XP RAM: DDR 256 PC2700 HD: 30gig Maxtor (5400) Video: G4 MMX 440 64mb PS: 300w

If you are formatting it and it's running slow, there might be bad Sector's/Cluster on your Harddrive. You should run scan disk from a Windows 98SE Bootup disk, after scandisk select to check cluster's. See what it comes up with.

Do you have the MaxBlast disk? If not, go to the Maxtor website & download it...then use it to test the integrity of your HDD

sorry for the late follow-up. but my follow up will be intended for anyone who is searching through the archives for this problem. Chris was right. The hard drive starting finding bad sectors when i did a surface scan.