problem with windows7 or hardrive or something else?

[Balain]

So sometime last week I decided to wipe my computer and re-install windows from scratch. My computer was okay, but somethings just seemed slow and it has been awhile since I did a clean install.

After re-installing most everything, I shut windows down for the night and it is installing 148 updates. Next morning I start computer and chkdsk is running. Saying it needs to check the file system of Drive c: I have never seen windows 7 do this yet. It checks everything finds no errors that I saw. and then tries to configure updates. It gets no where, restores to previous settings and re-boots. It updates again only about 100 updates this time.

Now today when I boot up my machine chkdsk is running again it finds nothing that I can see. Windows is trying to configure 3 service packs. It fails restores previous settings and reboots. Then it says configuring service pack 3 of 3. gets so far reboots, and continues from where it left off.

So I am thinking disk problem. I think that drive is about 4 years old. Any other ideas or anyone else seen this before?

[factotum]

If it's having to chkdsk on boot that definitely suggests a bad shutdown, but if the drive was actually faulty you'd expect chkdsk to find some issues, so not sure what the issue is there. One thing that *does* occur is that I had a machine with faulty RAM in it some time ago, and the symptoms were very similar to what you're seeing--CHKDSK on bootup would report everything fine, because it doesn't use much memory, but when you actually got into Windows and it started using the faulty piece of memory you'd get all sorts of odd file errors. Is there any way you can remove or swap out memory to see if it fixes the issue?

(148 updates sounds like an awful lot, mind you--if I'd been doing this I'd have got the standalone installer for Service Pack 1 onto a USB stick so I could do that as the first thing after installation).

[Balain]

Hmm, I don't have any extra ram here. A friend might. I will check tomorrow. And yeah I never thought of a standalone installer for the service pack I will go that too and put it on a thumb stick.

Thanks for the ideas.

[Venctin]

If you wanna go really crazy, you could put a linux distro or some other OS on there, and see how it runs on one of them. If it runs fine, it indicates something wrong with your specific install of Windows, rather than the hardware.

[noparlpf]

(148 updates sounds like an awful lot, mind you--if I'd been doing this I'd have got the standalone installer for Service Pack 1 onto a USB stick so I could do that as the first thing after installation).

That's about what it's going to do right at installation if you let it update itself. I just got a nearly-unused old netbook we found in a dead relative's house. It's running XP. Of course, the first thing I did was install updates (second thing was antivirus, obviously). It pulled up over 100 updates.