Secondly, for the past couple of days I've been hearing an obnoxiously loud ticking noise from my HDDs. They used to be dead silent but now I'm getting sick of the ticking every time the HDD is loading something. Speedfan's SMART analysis shows nothing wrong, other than a "watch" for the 'power on hours' section of both drives. I ran chkdisk /f on both drives and the ticking only happened while the D drive was being scanned. Both were free of any errors or bad sectors. I loaded up Diskeeper and lo and behold, the HDD in charge of the D drive was heavily fragmented. Funny, that never happened before as I always have DK's auto defrag running. That seems to have done away with the noise.
Then I came across a bigger problem. The Start menu was suffering from some freezing, but the Add/Remove Programs dialog was completely unusable. If I tried to uninstall or change something within the list, the dialog box would remain open but completely frozen. The only way to get through it was with a restart. Menus and everything else still worked, just the filthy bastard of a dialog box frozen in the middle of the screen. I was able to make the problem reappear by trying to uninstall a program but canceling the confirmation. That seems to have gone away after the defrag, but I'm not too sure.
As I was running GRID and testing some Fraps recording, I minimized the game and opened a small 10 second AVI video clip in WMP. After I closed that and moved through a couple folders, all hell broke loose. The entire screen just froze up immediately. The only thing I could do was bring up the task manager. Everything else was frozen and unusable. Even time stood still. I had to do a hard restart to get that shit over with.
I finally had enough and went into System Restore. I noticed that I have a restore checkpoint for every day of this month. I selected June 1st and the restore only took about 2 seconds to complete. Curious. Once the desktop loaded up, I was greeted with a nice "Restore Incomplete" dialog. I tried a whole bunch of other restore points - the result was the same.
Event viewer doesn't say anything other than system restore didn't work because it didn't work.
*sigh* I'm completely stumped. If you can lend a hand, I'd greatly appreciate it.A restoration to "System Checkpoint" restore point failed. No changes have been made to the system.
