Too much HDD?

A

amtrakusa

New Member
Greetings All: My first post.

My oldest computer, purchased 2003, (a HP pavilion 540n desktop) originally came with a 40 gig HD. A few months back I upgraded the HD and reloaded XP onto a 250 gig HD. Everything ran fine for a few months and now it shuts down completely after a few minutes. Would the motherboard be shutting it down because there is now too much stored on the HD and it cannot handle or process though all of the information on the HD?

I've checked the RAM, put in a new processor and have run several virus programs (when it will run for those few minutes).

Many thanks! Dan
 
If its shutting down, then most likely its overheating on you. Open the side of the case and take a can of compressed air and blow out around the cpu fan. If its that old and never been cleaned out then I'm sure its pretty bad inside.
 
What percentage do you have left on your HDD? Never wanna go less than 10-15%, and that's still a lot. Make sure your power settings haven't been screwed up. I know on Win7 there's an option where you can turn drives off after a given amount of minutes.
 
The CPU doesn't attempt to read or process all that's stored on your HDD at once. As you start new programs they are then loaded into memory. When all of your physical memory is in use, then the OS will start swapping some of the info it has in memory out to your disk drive which is very time consuming. At any rate, running out of memory will bring processing to a standstill but won't cause the computer to shutdown.

As johnb35 said, you are most likely experiencing over heating which has nothing to do with the size of your HDD or how much is stored on it.
 
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Thanks all for the information. I'm going to replace the power supply next. Off to Ebay for that. Many thanks again!
 
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