HI there.

I have a problem that is baffling me as to what I should be trying to fix..

Dell E521 Desktop, around 4 years old (out of warranty). There is no floppy drive, nor do I have an external one.

The PC has been acting a bit slow in the past week, in that internet speeds dropped down to around 20kBps download. Im on a 8 meg pipe and all other machines sharing the same router had expected speeds of around 5/6 meg. Just before this happened, I took my regular weekly Ghost backup of C

Last night the speeds dropped completely (even google was taking ages to load) so I rebooted. The machine would get past the WinXP slash screen, and then sit on black, so I tried to boot to Safe Mode, but it would get to the part where it loads the drivers and would stop at hotcore3.sys. I googled this and saw some posts about Paragon Partition Manager being corrupt, so I thought I would just restore my working Ghost back-up.

However, two things are now happening that makes me think this is not a Windows problem:

1) When I switch the PC on and the first Dell splash screen is displayed (I think is where it POSTS) there is a progress bar that used to take no longer than say 2 seconds to complete. Now it sits just before the halfway mark for upto 30 seconds. I can at this point get into the BIOS and have no issues navigating/changing stuff in there. The HDs are still listed and nothing looks odd. If I dont boot to BIOS, the machine goes to the Windows 'Windows didnt start properly last time....' screen.

2) The most notable thing is that I cant even boot the Ghost recovery disc properly. It lets me boot from the disc, and I see a full width progress bar at the bottom of the screen, but once it's filled with white, it boots into the recovery disc no further.

As the Ghost recovery program runs from the RAM, Im thinking that perhaps this is an issue with RAM, and that perhaps if I could see why POST is taking so long, I may se an issue when it checks the RAM. But actually Im now doubting myself because I would have thought that corrupt RAM wouldnt even let me get past POST.

I've decided that one day I just need to sit down and remove the devices one by one, and swap/remove RAM sticks (if indeed that are two sticks; I've only opened the machine once to install an HD and I cant remember what the RAM array was).

So is there anything glaringly obvious here? Should I go about trying to find that fault in a particular order?

My other concern is that if I cant get a live recovery program to run, I wont be able to run a live Linux distro so that I can pull some files off the HD that I need for work. If Im not able to find and fix the issue quickly, will this mean I have to spend some cash on a SATA HD enclosure?

Thanks very much in advance for any advice and help

OK, an update..

The machine is now booting into normal windows mode, and Im able to run the Norton Live software. Sometimes POST is taking a little longer than usual, but it's pretty much been behaving itself. However, the internet speed still seems to be crawling. Google.co.uk can take around 2 mins to load...

What I have done to try and track the fault:

With current install, I shut off all security applications and ran a speedtest. The result from the speedtest was patchy, as most of the time it won't even run the download test. The ping/latency test seems OK, with an averate time of 20ms. The few times the download test did work, it only registered around 250kbps, and seemed to really stutter whilst performing the test (as in the progress bar would only increase little by little).

Despite any laptop connecting to my router wirelessly gets expected speedtest results of around 5mbps, I decided to look at the router. I have tried a different port on the router, and even reset the router to factory default and re-flashed the firmware. None of this worked, so I decided to make sure it wasnt a Windows fault by

I reverted back to a 'base' image (pretty much a reformat). This didn't cure it, so Im ruling out a Windows issue now. With the effective reformat still running, I disabled the on-board NIC and installed a spare PCI NIC I had. This had no effect either, and if anything, the speed seems to have got worse.

After much head scratching, I decided to have a look at how these speed tests actually work, and found that they download some temp files to the PC and simply look at how quickly the files were downloaded. I began to think of the process involved in downloading, and thought about the HD write speeds. I dont know how to test a HD for something like this, but I would expect a faulty HD would affect windows in general. I copied a 700MB file from my C drive to L, and then back again (L is on a physically different drive) and there was no difference in the copy times, and it only took around 20 seconds to copy the file each way.

I previously mentioned bad RAM, but the PC itself performs fine, and the installed 2gig of RAM is reflected in the system properties and Task Manager.

OK, problem solved. It seems my router, a Netgear DGN2000 is notorious for developing a problem with the LAN ports: Cat 5 Lan Ports Dead.... Help.... - NETGEAR Forums

I had the PC off and was watching TV and saw the LED for LAN port 1 going a bit mental, so I googled 'DGN2000 slow internet' and came up trumps Luckily the router comes with a 2 year warranty, and Netgear have already given me an RMA!!

edit: And I guess it's quite possible that the faulty LAN port was upsetting the PC during POST..

Maybe your PC got the Bio LAN boot option enabled so PC will look for the external LAN to reply a confirmation and wait for the timeout to continue booting process.

Other good example is having an USB HDD connected to the PC and some mainbaords will not pass the USB HDD scanning stage before showing any POST or boot screen.

So it is a wise option to check the Bio and disable everything related to peripheral LAN boot connection or external device boots.

Cheers!
Bill