Hey, all.

First of all, apologies for throwing out "ONE of those". I realise that this could be any NUMBER of things, but I thought I'd give it a shot.

Secondly.. if you can't be bothered with reading the history of the problem, just head for the bold at the bottom for a summary. Otherwise, read on...

Basically, I've been messing with my setup a little bit recently to get some better PERFORMANCE out of old gear.. and as you probably could've guessed from that ominous opening.. it all went horribly wrong.

I reformatted the hard-drive to start over. Reinstalled windows, then went ahead with the new things. One of each 1gb + 512mb ram installments, a new 22" screen, tv reciever, DvD RW drive, Wireless network card and a trusty old external harddrive.

Everything was going peachy, but my CPU wasn't quite keeping up. I've got an Athlon 2.6.. which is only running at 1.8mhz, but that's the way it always seems to go. For the first few days I relished the speed, playing with the Nvidia multi-desktop function and all other kinds of stuff; playing games that recommened a higher processor speed, no worries. Then the system started lagging. The CPU was spiking every 4 seconds or so to about 80%+ usage and freezing my entire system up for a second or so. Without me even doing anything. The only thing I can think of is that the amount of ram I was using was just a stupid idea with the processor speed, but that's a stab in the dark.

I reformatted again, just incase I'd downloaded some bogus software in my speed-loving spree, and everything ran fine. For about 20 minutes. Then came the nasty spikes in the taskbar performance tab. Horrible. I'd guessed that the CPU would've struggled a few days ago, and there's already one in the post.. so I went gun-hoe with what I already had.

Removed the heat-sink, cleaned out the fan, had a look at the CPU itself to make sure I had no crud going on. And at the same time I saw a sticker on my video card.. so I pulled that off. Put everything back in place.. then turned it on. Everything sounds okay inside, but there's nothing showing on the moniter. At first I thought I'd iced my video card, but it works in the machine I'm using now.. so. Long story short..

If I break the seal between my heat-sink and the CPU, take the CPU out for a gander, clean out the fan, then stick it all back in place.. would the monitor have just cause to ignore the fact that my machine is on? Again.. the hardware sounds like it's running, fans on, system beeps. Just no activity monitor wise (and I've tried a few monitors.. all of which work on other machines).

Oh, and I've no password or anything setup, so it has the opportunity to just log straight on.. but I've left it on for a few minutes to test, and there's no windows introduction sound through the speakers (though I put this down to an error message stalling the boot sequence to tell me that there's something wrong on the hardware side (not that I can read it)).

Thanks a lot for your time, especially if you went the long way around.

S.Bants.First thing you should try is to use your onboard video. That way you know for sure if it's your video card or not. Also, breaking the seal between the processor and the heatsink is fine. As long as there was some silicon left over before you reseated the processor. That way it won't overheat as easily. You should also check to make sure your video card is seated in all the way. Take it out and put it back in again.I've had the video card out several times to check it on other machines, and tried holding it in with a bit more pressure to see if it was a loose contact. I just can't figure out what's going on.

No onboard video that I have a lead to connect too. The video card though, as I said.. works perfectly in another machine, so I know it's not that. And I don't see how it's dock has been changed in the time it's messed up. The only thing that I know has changed for sure is the CPU coming out and back in again. I can't think of anything else.

Extremely annoying, in any case.I managed to get hold of another motherboard which happily ACCEPTED all of the hardware I had on the previous machine. Everything ran fine, then came the spikes.

I soon realised that there was a connection between the fact that my CPU usage was shooting through the roof, and that I'd installed the drivers too my new BELKIN WIRELESS G DESKTOP CARD. Not a happy bunny.

Thanks for the help though. Peace.Once you remove the CPU it needs to be thoroughly cleaned off and have new thermal compound applied...
This is IMPORTANT.
Travel to Arctic Silver 's site for recommendations on the procedure.
Secondly if you had made any BIOS changes in the process of tweaking the machine these do not disappear from wiping the HDD and re-installing the OS.
I would enter setup on re-boot and set the BIOS back to the default values after following the above advice to see if this improves your condition...