Is it my hard drive or gfx card?

[meg]

Hey guys, I have a quick troubleshooting question.

First of all, my computer has been running a bit slow lately, it's kind of choppy, startup is much slower than usual. Video when I'm playing a game (L4D, WoW, Spore, you name it. it's crashed) will just freeze, but my music will still play smoothly in the background, but it leaves me with no choice but to manual restart as it locks up the system AT the video game (fullscreen).

It is DEFINITELY *not* infected with a Virus.. (I work at geek squad and have run those utilities on my computer) but I wanted a second opinion on this, since I'm pretty sure either the hard drive or video card is going.

I planned to eventually upgrade two components in my system: hard drive and video card. What I'm working with now is 4gb ram, c2duo @ 3ghz, nvidia 8800 gt, and the hard drive is your typical 7,200 rpm. But right now I don't have the money to throw into upgrading both, so I wanted to upgrade the most critical (most likely to croak first).

Like I said, I'm thinking it's one of those two, but if anyone has any other opinions, throw em at me

note: I recently reformatted my computer about a month ago. So I doubt that'll be a good solution either!

meg

 

[lion149]

This will be a great time to rely on friends, borrow a GPU and give it a try, if it works then you would want to replace that first.

 

[StrangleHold]

Have you checked your GPU temps?

 

[DogFaceBoy]

Most likely your CPU temps too high.

 

[sg1]

Do you have onboard graphics? at least you will be able to remove graphics card and start up with onboard and see if the problem is still there(but maybe not in the games)- if it is, then you can lean towards the HDD being the problem. In which case - I would back up my data(A wise precaution anyway) and invest in another HDD.

Assuming you do have onboard- at least you will still be able to use PC if it turns out the Graphics card is the issue.