[ptitch]

Hi,
I have a HP Pavillion S7640-UK runnig Windows XP Media Centre SP3. Recently all my programs have been running slow and not responding. When I look at Task Manager on performance the CPU is on 0 so there is nothing being used and the page file is low so nothing seems to be a miss there. I shut my pc down last night and everthing was normal, when I booted it up this morning it got to splash screen then went black I had a curser and it moved around. I left it and in the end it said Reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key. I rebooted and selected recovery console, I used fixboot and the same happened, I then used chkdsk /R this took 3 hours but after it did work but every couple of mins which ever program I used would not respond then 1 to 2 mins later it would work. I logged off then logged back in back to black screen followed the same steps now it loads up but the task bar is missing so repeated the steps now it just goes to black screen and nothing.
can anyone help.
Cheers

[Macboatmaster]

If I am not mistaken that is a desktop.
On the evidence available from your post I would think it is a failing hard drive. or possibly ram.
My recommendation would be to take the HDD out, slave it to another machine or run it as an external in an enclosure and run chkdsk /r. If I am right you will find that there were bad sectors.
Alternatively download a program such as Seatools for dos and check it insitu.
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.js...00dd04090aRCRD

As it is an HP it comes with I think HP diagnostics which includes a disk check. Whether or not it will run is a different matter. If you do not have the user guide go to the HP site and enter your model and id number if you wish, although just the model will suffice for these purposes and you will find ion the manual the instructions for running the diagnostics. Probably F11 on boot or similar.

If bad sectors are recorded and there is any data you need I would get it off the disc ASAP.