64x Vista Stalling/softlock

[Ceid]

Hello,

I'm having a problem with my home computer. I have tried to repair it myself, and I'm about to give up hope as I'm not sure of the cause of the problem. I'm using a hodgepodge of a machine that is about 5 years old and uses Vista 64x. I've upgraded various parts of the machine. The only remaining stock parts are the motherboard, CPU, and Harddrive.

Basically, there was a small brown out at my residence while the computer was running. Upon a reboot, everything seemed normal for about 5 minutes or so, and then the start menu would no longer respond. I could move the cursor around and click on icons, the icons would highlight as they would with a normal mouse over, but if I tried to open something It would stall and fail to load. The computer never appeared to be "thinking". Any attempts to restart the PC in normal mode end in the same results after the same 5 minutes or so.

The computer works fine in safe mode.

Virus scans with the standard Mcaffee and Avast show the system is negative.

System Restored for a month prior, same results.

Cleaned out the registry, same results.

Turned off all start up items save the core components and disabled my networking manually to prevent intrustion, same results.

I watched the resource monitor and the running applications to see if I could spot the cause, to no avail...

I ran a disk check from the bois last night, left it running over night, and when I went to check it this morning it had booted up in normal mode and soft locked again.

I'm not sure what to do other than salvage what I can, or a fresh install.

 

[CleaverX]

check for system files errors: Open a command prompt 'As Administrator', then run:


sfc /scannow


allow it to complete, then reboot

 

[Ceid]

I did as instructed. However, the response from my computer is kind of off putting...

Beginning verification phase of system scan.
Verification 100% complete.
Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files, but was unable to fix some of them.
Details are included in the CBS.log.

I found the log. There is a ton of stuff to sift through to find an issue... and way to much to post here.

But the issue remained upon reboot. The PC worked fine for 5-10 minutes, and then stopped responding.

 

[CleaverX]

Well so we know that your OS is corrupt and neither disk check or sfc could resolve the situation, so you should consider backing up your data and reinstall from scratch. In my 15 years as a support tech I have seen way too many computers being taken out by a brown out. In your case it was just the OS, so you were lucky. Just in case you should boot the machine from a rescue disk (available free on the internet) and first complete hardware diagnostics of both the hard drive and system memory.

 

[Ceid]

I used the rescue partition on boot and I ran the full gambit of test on my PC. no errors... so at least there is that. MY biggest issue is that this stock dell didn't come with a windows disk that I can find... The only thing that isn't replaceable on my PC are photos... the rest can be reinstalled / downloaded if need be.

I'll let you know if it works. Thank you for the advise.

Oh... I found the corrupted file, by the by. Its tcpmon.ini
Which, if I read correctly, is the updating file? I wouldn't think that it would cause my soft crashes... but hey, I really have no clue at this point...

 

[CleaverX]

Well if you could run the sfc /scannnow WITH a Vista installation DVD into your dvd player, the corrupted files can be replaced with originals unpacked from the installation dvd, so if you have one it would be worth a try.