Well my desktop has been giving me a lot of grief lately. I don't use it a whole lot so I've kinda been ignoring it. Most recently it got kicked out of a LAN party. Anyways I'll go through most of the issues I can recall offhand roughly in the order I noticed them.
First, I've been having issues with the computer dropping SATA drives for months. I know the drives are fine and not failing, just certain drives will dissapear while I'm using the computer and I can't access them. Sometimes a restart will fix it, sometimes I'll shut off and they'll be back when I boot a day or two later. This has happened to multiple drives, with no other signs of drive failure. Just to be safe I've backed up everything on the drives to an external and unplugged the drives. This issue has been present for over a year.
More recently I've noticed other issues. I've been having issues with video playback, play videos (720p) and after a while of smooth play the show keeps fragmenting and playback just quits, thought it might be corrupt files but copied to my laptop they play fine. Figured it might be a memory leak on my video card (Radeon HD 3850) so I got a barely used 8800GTS and replaced it. Performs better but similar playback issues still persist, card was working without any issue in other computers.
Then I went to copy some files to my external and the transfer rate was incredibly slow. It took over an hour for under 3gb of data to transfer. Which then took less than a minute to copy from the same external to my laptop.
The slow transfer rate made me think it might be the USB, but it's worked fine in the past. However I have had issues with the usb ports occasionally not recognizing peripherals I plug in since the start. Unplugging and changing ports a few times works.
Finally I went to a LAN party over a weekend recently, and the computer tripped the breakers there as soon as I plugged it in. It did this both on a circuit with a number of other computers on it, and it also tripped a breaker with only my computer on it. Needless to say my computer got kicked out of the LAN and I spent the rest of the LAN playing Minecraft on my netbook, not fun. At home both before and after the LAN party the computer starts fine without tripping any breakers in my apartment. The people running the LAN say they think I have a bad power supply or a short and this generally happens to a few people at each LAN.
Cliffnotes:
-SATA drives randomly cannot be accessed and show back up after restarts
-Poor video playback on HD graphics cards
-Extremely slow transfer rate
-Possible USB issues
-Computer trips breakers at a LAN party, no issues in my apartment
I'm a bit fed up. I'm really tempted to build a new rig however I'm saving money to buy a new car next spring or summer and therefore don't want to spend the money I'd need to in order to build a new rig the way I'd want. I'm fairly comfortable using only my laptop most of the time. However it's still a netbook and despite the dual core and Ion graphics it's not really suitable for all the games I like.