Constant resetting and crashes, any long term effects?

[AD-15]

hello,

I have had many problems with my new system, and as a result I have had to reflash the CMOS three times, reset many many times, I've had to cut the power, you get the idea.

My question is, does this have any permenent/long term implications for the system?

Thanks!

[aidanjt]

Hard cutting power on a constant basis will trash your HDD.

[Clunk]

It would also depend on what was causing the problems.

[peterb]

Not doing a graceful or controlled shutdown can leave lots of temporary files littered about your system which will use up hard disk space. In addition there is a risk that files may not be fully written to the disk so you get corrupted files and/or a damaged file system. Usually operating systems can correct these at the next start up (but at teh expense of longer boot up times.

You don't saty what the OS is, but it might be adviseable to run a disk repair tool and a defragging tool to tidy things up (they may take a long time to run) and look at the location where system temporary files are kept and delete any old ones (those created before the current date will be safe to delete. If you are using Windows there will be a cleanup temporary files tool somewhere.

[AD-15]

hello,

Thankyou so much for your advice guys.

I'm using Vista 32, it's the new 3XS system I got from Scan.

I'd say I've reset/cut power etc about 10+ times now.

I'm not worried about things like fragmentation,which can be sorted out, but the actual physical damage. Is it just the HDD that can be affected?

[peterb]

I'm not sure the HDD will be bothered. All modern drives self park the heads if power goes down (think about removeable HDDs in USB caddies - they are just powered down by pulling the plug) There shouldn't be any risk of physical damage by hard powering off.

[AD-15]

Ok, thankyou so much again!

What should I do to clean up the drive? Just a bit of defrag?

[peterb]

scandisk and then look to delete temporay files (not sure where that tool is or what it is called under vista) then defrag.

[AD-15]

hello,

Thanks again!

Call me obsessive, but could this possibly affect the performance of the computer, speed or stability wise?