Hello. I'm running an old Windows Vista machine, bought in 2008, and I haven't touched the innards of it at all, with two exceptions: Once when I acquired it to pop in a PCi wireless card in order to be able to use the internet in my basement, and another time to replace said card after it started to malfunction. Other than that though, it ran very smoothly up until... I want to say about a week ago, maybe less.
Within the last week, I've gone to turn on the computer and it powers on for less than a second before shutting off again. This repeats two or three times before I can even get to the boot screen. After that, during the process of loading, the display will flicker black, then back to normal again, sometimes several times within a few-second interval. Occasionally when it does this, it will power off as well. Other times it'll just... stop doing it and be fine for the rest of the night.
Also very recently, I've had incredibly slow internet, often dipping down to as low as 1 Mb/s (from about 54 Mb/s). This is the same problem the old card was having before I replaced it, and that was about two months ago now. The card is a Linksys Wireless-G PCi card, not necessarily the fastest thing I could be using but it was fast enough up until recently.
I legitimately have no idea what's going on and don't have a whole lot of money to replace major components/the whole computer, but I'd like to know what's going on so I can save money to fix it eventually.
EDIT: Perhaps I should share my computer specs.
I'm running Windows Vista Service Pack 2, on a Compaq Presario, 2 gigs ram (unknown maker, can't exactly crack my box open to check), 2.00 ghz processor (intel pentium dual CPU E2180, never been upgraded), and the sound and video cards that came with the computer (nvidia geforce 7100; some realtek thing) with the PCi card listed above. It was purchased in 2008. I am reasonably certain that it's a hardware problem, because all the software runs with minimal to no trouble.
