My PC is broken

Where should I start?

I got a 200 gig harddrive for christmas and was going to use it as a slave HD. To make a long story short, when I installed it, my machine (AMD 2100 XP, 1 gig ram, windows xp pro SP2) wouldn't recognize it. At start up, it would just hang on the part where it looks up the IDE drives. Unplugged it got it running normally. I bought the drive from Newegg, and I'm pretty sure it's a bum drive.

Now the more pressing problem, my comp has been running slow and shitty lately. Programs like Nero and Windows Media Player started crashing. Check for spyware (nothing) viruses (nothing again) and I defragged the drive (which was weird, it got to 25% done, after about an hour, and then when I came back 15 minutes later, it said it was done). Then the damn thing shut itself off. At boot up I now get the message "Warning! CPU Over Speed". What the hell does that mean? The processor isn't overclocked. When checking the BIOS it said the CPU temp was 159 F.

Is 159 (don't remember what that is in Celcius) normal for a AMD chip? I'm assuming it's overheating...I didn't check the fans because I had to run to work.

This is the first problem I've had with my PC and it fucking sucks. It's like my kid is sick or something.

no, 159 degrees is not normal at all

I thought so. I'll take the case off when I get home and start it up to see if the fan is spinning. Man I got a new wireless laser mouse and I can't even use the damn thing now.

159 degrees is roughly 70 degrees C°, the normal recommended working temperature of a hard disk is 35-40° C°. Personally, I'm betting on the heatsink itself, and not just the box fan.

Edit: So you are posting this with your mind powers, right?

159 was the temp of the CPU, not the hard disk.

And I'm posting from work.

Even with that, it's still not healthy. Depending on how old your PC was, and how good of a heatsink you had(emphasis on had), 70 degrees Celcius should be enough to cause a shutdown.

word. At least it won't be too costly to fix. I should get some of that wacky Artic Silver shit too.

As a side note... when you installed the new hard drive did you check to make sure the master/slave/cable select jumper was in the correct setting? Just wanted to check since where I work that's the number one reason we get hard drives returned. Although since you got it off the net it's no big surprise as hard drives often don't make the trip through shipping safely.

Yeah check the master/slave jumpers on your HDDs. You might've bumped the HSF when you were installing the HDD too, make sure it's in place properly because it shouldn't be overheating if your settings are stock.

My friend had a similar problem, it was caused by a loose power wire being jammed in his CPU fan.