Somewhat Time-Sensitive Problems with Steam and Game Connection Speed (And assorted other slightly u - Hardware & Software

Hey there assorted people who know way more about computers than I do! I've been stuck with some nasty problems revolving around Steam and, specifically, Team Fortress 2, that have been present since about December and have gotten worse in the last few months. Now the Saxxies (for those non-TF2 Players, an in-game competition) are coming up [I]very[/I] soon, and I've been intending to enter since last year's competition. Sadly, due to the issues my computer has been having, it may be impossible, which is why I've come to you guys for assistance to see if I can shape up my computer before the competition rolls around. I'll be frank, I know nothing of my computer's hardware, nor of computers in general, and I will be away from my computer until Tuesday night, so I can't give you specs or specific details about the computer itself other than the fact that it's several years old, hand-built, a desktop, and uses Windows XP. But what I [I]can[/I] do right now is explain the problem and see if anyone can give me any info on that. So before this December my computer ran smoothly. Steam would take a while to start up, but once it did, everything worked fine, and I could play Team Fortress 2 without many problems other than the occasional stutter or crash that is to be expected. Around December, though, things started to go downhill. TF2 would have horrible loading times- it'd take about 8 minutes to go from clicking "Play" to having the main menu fully loaded up. Once in-game, there'd be points when my ping would rocket from like 50 to 600 periodically, and basically the game was unplayable. From there it's just progressively gotten worse, with the load times for each map becoming unbearable, and the game simply unplayable. I thought originally it was a memory problem, because my hard drive had been partitioned (whatever that means) into 2 150 GB drives and the main one only had 4 left, and around that time Steam became unresponsive, opening up and then closing within seconds of the window popping up. Recently I undownloaded and redownloaded Steam entirely, which somehow brought me from 4 GB of Free Space to 111 GB of free space (jesus), and after a couple struggles with downloading that resulted in numerous restart attempts (thus leading to [I]more [/I] problems when TF2 and GMod wouldn't download/play properly) I finally got them up, but I can already tell there's still something wrong with TF2, in that it still takes forever to start and, when I opened up the Server Menu to find a server to play in, none came up even though it said it was refreshing. That's all I can tell you right now, but I hope perhaps I can get an idea of what's wrong from you guys before I get back, and if not I can always give you more specifics when I get home. I do hope the problem is solvable before early May, though. :P

I guess a good a place as any is to start by ruling out general hardware failure. Testing the psu voltages with a multimeter, performing smart tests on the hard drive and stability testing the system with something like prime 95 are all pretty simple and dont require any spare parts. Also defragmenting the hard drive could help with the load times and disabling any security in tje router could solve the lag problems. Hit me up on steam when youre back at your computer and ill help you as much as I can.

Hard drive might be going?

[QUOTE=chipset;35632324]I guess a good a place as any is to start by ruling out general hardware failure. Testing the psu voltages with a multimeter, performing smart tests on the hard drive and stability testing the system with something like prime 95 are all pretty simple and dont require any spare parts. Also defragmenting the hard drive could help with the load times and disabling any security in tje router could solve the lag problems. Hit me up on steam when youre back at your computer and ill help you as much as I can.[/QUOTE] Sweet, dude. Thanks! I'll chat you as soon as I can on Wednesday or so [QUOTE=TheLolrus;35635352]Hard drive might be going?[/QUOTE] Lordy I hope not...

The problems you're describing sound similar to what I had to deal with when my hard drive started to fail. As chipset suggested, run some tests. [url=http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=612&sid=3&lang=en]Western Digital[/url] has diagnostic software you can use, as does [url=http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=seatools-win&vgnextoid=552bd20cacdec010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD]Seagate.[/url] If it does turn out to be a hard drive issue, I have a spare 1TB Seagate drive lying around. It used to be an external drive, so it has this annoying power-down feature that I can't seem to turn off, but it works. Never mind. I accidentally destroyed the SATA data connection on the drive, so it's pretty much fucked. Sorry.

Hey guys, I did some stuff and now both Steam and TF2 start up. Yippie! ...problem is, now TF2 no longer has anything "responding to internet query." So I can't actually see if the game runs smoothly. Fuck. Any suggestions?