Computer rebooted itself regularly about 5 minutes after initial boot up but then did not do it again, even if left on all day, until it was shut down and rebooted. Then, it started making this noise which is just like the noise you hear when running defrag only it would just do it 4 times, (like 4 rolls) pause, then repeat. It does not do this noise when booted to diagnostic mode unless you click on a folder. EXTREMELY SLOW! Icons missing from control panel. Cannot access earlier dates for a system restore. Any ideas? All help is truly appreciated. Pat

My first guess is that the hard drive is getting ready to go. I would transfer everything onto a new drive as soon as possible.

Doing a system backup or data transfer would be prudent but it amazes me how often people want to blame the hard drive when things don't look right. Hard drives are much more reliable now then they once where. Try deleting all of the temporary files (many of them are probably in the WINDOWS directory itself. Most of the folders that begin with $NT are unnecessary. Also, all of the text files beginning with KB are extras. You can also use the cleanup wizard to handle these. John W. Borelli IT Specialist OmniIT borelli35

Well you can do what Worldlibrary said and also try to monitor you computer's temperature. Also I want to ask. Have you cleaned your tower? If you don't then start looking for a good advice on how to clean it. This problem is cause of too much heat is happening to your computer. Your computer is heating up because of too much dust on it. So cleaning it might keep it alive more. I want to ask as well is your computer's brand is DELL? Want A Weekly Update on Latest System Security Problem http://www.systemsecurityinstitute.org

The fan did have a lot of dust in it so I completely cleaned everything. Ran chkdsk and it said that it found 2 errors at $130 but it was in read-only mode so I guess it couldn't automatically fix them. Does not need defrag and says "healthy system". Does not make the 4 rolls sound in diagnostic mode, except when I click on something. Deleted all temp files, ran CC Cleaner, Spybot, Alvira, nothing found but it seems really odd to me that networking is gone, windows firewall got turned off and cannot be turned back on because it says it can't find ICS, system restore will not roll back the calender to March, and IE7 cannot be "repaired" by using the "add/remove" programs list. I noticed something else. It sounds like it partially boots 2 or maybe even 3 times right at start up. I almost wonder if all I need to do is re-install XP. This is a custom built computer with an ASROCK motherboard, 3 GB processor, Excel Stor Calisto 80GB hard drive, 1 GB PC3200 DDR RAM, and I forget what type of video card but it has 16 mb of memory on it. Thanks to all for your replies. I cannot imagine how this thing fell apart so quickly as it was working good for a real long time.

Oh yeah, and one thing more. When cleaning, I noticed that the 2nd connector on the ribbon cable that goes to the hard drive had fallen off and was laying inside the case. No idea when or how that happened. Would that cause a problem?