Half a PC?

So today my computer started to run far slower than normal while playing Minecraft. While it can run at far renderdistance fine usually, this morning the Frames per Second turned into more of a badly animated GIF file. My processor was constantly maxing out while doing this. I closed some other programs that usually run in the background, like Skype, Steam and Xfire, which didnt seem to make much difference.

I've tried most things to get it back up to speed. I've cleared some crap off of the harddrive, closed all other programs, even found a spybot on my PC (don't know how it got there as I have high security, but I removed it anyway), rebooted the machine, and the processor was still maxing out, even though my memory usage is fine still.

One of my more hardware-minded friends has suggested one of the cores in my processor (AMD Athlon X64 Dual-Core @ 2.4Ghz if that's any help) has died, and while playing Minecraft I'm seeing loads of evidence for this, when I'm not using Minecraft everything seems to be just fine.

If it's any more help, I am running Vista (joke all you want, Vista usually runs 100% fine for me) and I have 2GB RAM.

If you know anything else, it would be a great help. Thanks.

EDIT: It isn't just Minecraft, playing my usual setup on Skulltag now has killer Frames per second as well.

That sounds more like hardware acceleration of your graphics card has died.
How are other games?

Graf Zahl said:

That sounds more like hardware acceleration of your graphics card has died.
How are other games?

I don't think so, my graphics card started up as normal when I rebooted the machine, and OpenGL does still work on Skulltag. Just slower.

EDIT: Graphics card is an Nvidia Geforce 5400GS 256MB.

EDIT 2: My computer's base score also dropped from 3.0 to 2.0. The bottleneck at the moment is "Graphics". Gaming performance seems to be rather low as well, at 2.5.

A memory stick could also have died, forcing your computer to trash the hard disk. Also, check out for failed fans/cooling on the graphics card and/or the CPU itself. It may throttling itself down to prevent overheating.

Notice any tearing or crazy colors while you're playing games as well? It's sounding like you've got a bad GPU.

No, no bad colors or any visual abnormalities.

I had this problem on my laptop up until very recently. Same processor as yours. I was having abnormal processor peaks, extremely sluggish performance. Cleaned up background software, uninstalled just about everything that hasn't been used within a week. Restarted, no boot up what so ever. Blank screen. Tried the battery solo, lead in, lead in w/o battery.. nothing.

So I hit it. Right around where the power lead in is located.

Toshiba logo flashes on the screen, boots up normally, no sluggish performance or processor peaks at all so far. In fact this is the best it's run since I uninstalled Vista for a clean XP installation. I also bought an industrial strength cooling pad which helped quite a bit with any graphics heavy applications.

So I guess my advice would be to give it a good smack and let it think about what it's done.

So where is the Power Lead located? I wanna try it for fucks sake, because my computer is having a lot of similar issues (which is wierd since it is exactly the same as a nother computer of mine, which runs great.)

Well, my cpu is a laptop. The power lead is just where the power supply connects in. To be perfectly honest, I wouldn't ever seriously take any computer repair advice from myself. The smart thing to do in my case would be to get the input jack replaced and call it a day... but that's the smart thing to do.

Ed said:

So I guess my advice would be to give it a good smack and let it think about what it's done.

I did this to a DX-7 and it's been working great ever since. I know it isn't proper troubleshooting but going a little caveman on a device seems to fix it. Works great on old TVs.

Still won't fix it's clunky programming interface! :P

http://www.vintagesynth.com/yamaha/dx200.php
That sure as hell did though. The lack of wood paneling though.. just not the same :\

Throttling due to overheating sounds like the most likely problem.

Ed said:

So I hit it. Right around where the power lead in is located.

Good old-fashioned percussive maintenance. That was common practice with valve equipment where the vibration was sometimes enough to temporarily fix a dodgy connection, though blowing the dust out with a vacuum cleaner and re-seating the valves usually provided a longer lasting cure.

You problem's either worn connectors in the power jack or weakened solder joins (dry joints), I'd suggest you have it looked at.

Csonicgo said:

Works great on old TVs.

Oh yes it does... Even though some people will give you looks...

Ok, it's been sorted. I had my stepfather look at it.

The graphics card was dead, confirmed when the display suddenly died about an hour ago. Looks like I should have dusted more, the fan on the graphics card was filled with dust, which explains the overheating. There seems to be some issues with the harddrive as well, although not fatal.

So while I have no money to spend on a graphics card at the moment, switching back to onboard graphics has at least made all of my games playable again. (Even software render Skulltag was having major slowdown on stock Doom 2 maps).

When Im finally able to get a job, a graphics card will be a higher-up thing to buy. Especially since I'm taking a college course in games design where I may need all the power I can get from my machine.