I have a Compaq Presario R3000 that's about three years old, running Windows XP with an AMD processor, 40 GB hard drive and about 1 GB RAM. About six months ago, whenever I turned it on, it would occasionally seem to freeze at the initial loading screen, the one that says "Compaq." You can do nothing to get it past that except cut the power to the computer and reboot it; I've tried hitting every key, combinations of keys, waiting half an hour, nothing works. When you do reboot it, it comes up with various computer goobley-gook, and the messages that the system time and date are invalid, and that the computer did not finish loading on the previous attempt. When Windows opens, the date and time have reset to Jan. 1, 2003, 12:00 am. I formatted the computer in an attempt to fix this, but it did no good.
This is in addition to the fact that there are issues with the sound; for about the last year, it has a tendency to randomly cut out. I listen to a lot of music on my computer, but the sound will just suddenly stop. All the setting show that there should still be sound coming from it. Rebooting it doesn't help; you have to give it an actual physical jar to get it working again. I figured it was a loose connection or something. But it's been happening more frequently.
In addition to that, when I open up my "My Documents" folder, the files are scattered around in random order. I can right click and select to organize them by name, but it only halfway works; it won't organize the files at top, they're mixed in with everything else, and they're not in order.
I also write stories, and I had one that had three chapters finished that I had to let sit for a while. When I came back to it, half the first chapter was gone, all but two paragraphs of the second was deleted, and half the third chapter was gone.
I have Trend Micro Antivirus on here (not my preference, but required by my college) and I defrag the computer regularly. I'm suspecting there are motherboard issues, hard drive issues, or both. Any help or opinions?
