[devzz]

Hello,

I'm having a huge problem with my desktop right now. It's pretty old, but has worked well so far (except for the few BSODs and a GPU that needed replacing 6 months ago).

I'm running Windows XP Pro SP3.

The problem is: about 10-15 minutes after starting up my Windows, everything freezes. That is, everything except for the mouse cursor. I can move the cursor but can't click on anything, nor can I use the keyboard (sometimes the Windows key pops up the Start menu, which I can't use). It seems that this happens faster if i run a game or an application. Sometimes even the cursor freezes for a while. The only option I have is a forced shutdown.

I ran memtest and it turns out RAM is probably not the problem since it passed 5 times with no errors. I suspect HDD to be the problem because another problem appeared after several reboots: the DISK BOOT FAILURE error. There are times when I am able to enter Windows, but mostly not.

Note that I've been running the desktop without any internet connection for the past two weeks, and the only thing I've changed is installing a game and MagicISO beforehand.

I would really prefer to fix this problem myself (with your help), since I am just a regular student without much money to invest in repairs. I will provide additional information if needed.
Any ideas? Thank you in advance.

[devzz]

Also: i tried defragmenting and doing chkdsk. It freezed even faster so I wasn't able to finish any.

[SUEOHIO]

If you got the disk boot failure message it usually means the harddrive is going or is gone.If thats the case all you can do is replace the harddrive.Hopefully you have saved things like pix, documents, etc, on cds so they wont be lost forever.