Power cord blew, computer is now sporadically slow

So I have a substantial gaming/ graphic arts computer running Windows 7 Ultimate. A few weeks ago I was playing a game when my power cord blew. The computer instantly shut off and there was a hole in the side of the wire; I quickly replaced the power strip and the cord in case either had problems, booted up the computer again, and it was okay. Working as normal.

A few days later, after a few hours of work it would start to slow down. I would restart it and it would be okay, but it gradually became slower and slower.

A few days ago I noticed that turning on the computer was taking longer and longer; finally today I turned it on and it took a full fifteen minutes to boot past the glowy windows logo. Then logging on took over twenty minutes to process, before finally being too slow to do anything with. Rebooting several times yielded the same result. I did a memory test which yielded no negative results, but this time it started up again. I've tested all the hardware and nothing seems to be functioning incorrectly. It slows down and finally it becomes unbearable and unusable.

I have no crapware installed and it's always run squeaky clean until now. I've never seen anything like this before and Google was no help. Could any of you know what's wrong?

Specs:

AMD FX-6300 6-core 3.5GHz CPU

16Gb 1333MHz DDR3 RAM

nVidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti 256-bit 1Gb Graphics card

ASRock 980DE3-U3S3 Motherboard

Seagate 1Tb HDD

Thanks in advance!

Thomas

Posted 2015-06-11T00:05:43.527

Reputation: 1

Answers

Replace the power supply (or at least borrow one to see if it'll help). If there was a surge big enough to blow a hole in your power cord, it could have very easily damaged something in your PSU. Perhaps not enough to keep the computer from starting at all, but it sounds a bit like maybe the memory or processor isn't getting all the power they need so it's getting underclocked and running slower.

If you have a multimeter, you could also check all the wires in the various connectors are putting out near their expected voltages.

kazoni

Posted 2015-06-11T00:05:43.527

Reputation: 633

Processors do not lower their speed if they don't get enough power. They draw the power they need, and if the PSU can't provide it, it shuts down, or failing that ( broken psu ), the system malfunctions and/or reboots. A reduced processor frequency wouldn't account for significantly long boot times either. – psusi – 2015-06-11T02:06:51.650

It would be really stupid to blame the power surge for this reason. I used to use bootvis on Windows XP to get a detailed report about the system boot. For Windows 7 you have WinBootInfo which is a closest alternative to bootvis.

Just run a search on Google to download it.

HawkEye

Posted 2015-06-11T00:05:43.527

Reputation: 1