xt938 extremely slow and orange light constantly lit

Greetings
I have a Pavilion xt938 with 768 Mb of ram, 2 hard drives, Radeon 7000 video
card. In December I crashed it and could not perform a destructive restore
because it
'could not find the user partition'. I took it to Staples, they restored
it, and when I got it back it was extremely slow and the yellow light under
the POWER button was pretty much constantly on. Took it back and they did
some troubleshooting and thought that either the hard drive was going bad,
on the new memory module was bad. When I started it up after the second time
everything seemed normal, with the same memory installed.
Yesterday I had to turn off power to the PC to reset my cable modem. First
time it's been powered down since December, even though I reboot about every
other day. Now it's doing it again, slow and the light below the power
button is pretty much constantly on. In addition, if I play music it sounds
garbled when the light is on, but OK when it's not.
Any ideas what can be going on? Should I go out and pick up a new hard
drive? Is the whole PC about shot or what?
Any ideas or help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

Henk

 

The yellow light indicates that the hard disk drive is being accessed? One of
two possibilities:

1. The hard drive is failing.
2. There is some stealth software in the system. Take your pick: spyware,
adware, trojan, etc. And the software is beating the hard drive to death doing
whatever its master has told it to do.

I'll bet on a hard drive failing if the system showed the same symptoms even
immediately after the Staples tech restored it. The garbled sound is because
the audio software cannot get enough processor cycles to play the audio
properly.

Identify the make and model of the hard drive, then download the drive
manufacturer's diagnostics. Run the diagnostics and report the results. If the
drive is failing and the system is out of warranty, a new replacement drive will
make the system behave like new. And new drives are not too expensive any more.

As a matter of normal practice, I ALWAYS run hard drive and memory diagnostics
when I take in a sick system from a customer. But then Staples techs are
probably paid not much more than minimum wage, and Staples gets the expertise
that it pays for... Ben Myers