A6430f Pavilion, Turn into Boat Anchor, help

Question

First off here are my system spec's: It's an HP Pavilion a6430f
OS Name Microsoft® Windows Vista™ Home Premium
Version 6.0.6001 Service Pack 1 Build 6001
Other OS Description Not Available
OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation
System Name LINNEA-PC
System Manufacturer HP-Pavilion
System Model KJ378AAR-ABA a6430f
System Type X86-based PC
Processor AMD Phenom(tm) 8400 Triple-Core Processor, 2100 Mhz, 3 Core(s), 3 Logical Processor(s)
BIOS Version/Date Phoenix Technologies, LTD 5.14, 6/20/2008
SMBIOS Version 2.4
Windows Directory C:\Windows
System Directory C:\Windows\system32
Boot Device \Device\HarddiskVolume1
Locale United States
Hardware Abstraction Layer Version = "6.0.6001.18000"
User Name Linnea-PC\Linnea
Time Zone Pacific Daylight Time
Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 3.00 GB
Total Physical Memory 2.87 GB
Available Physical Memory 936 MB
Total Virtual Memory 5.73 GB
Available Virtual Memory 3.31 GB
Page File Space 2.93 GB
Page File C:\pagefile.sys
I bought this system refurbished and it blew up after a month. Sent it in and since it's back I have a recovery disk that only has 8mb left on it and I get all the error messages. It also will freeze up or move very very slow. Then sometimes I get the blue screen of death. I have done everything, run all the systems diagnostic test to see if there are any hard drive problems or memory leeks, error, etc. Can't find a thing. I did how ever go to various forums and found out that people seem to be buying new hard drives for this model and then one guy said that he bought this computer system and thought that the hard drive wasn't compatible with Vista and so he switched everything to XP and now it runs fine.
And here's another one I found somewhat interesting:
Don't buy this computer if you run Vista, April 25, 2008
By Henry T. Bluing
Purchased this computer about a month ago, started it up started loading software and files from my old computer and the fun started. The computer would randomly freeze up for no apparent reason, the mouse and keyboard were unresponsive. Went through all the normal trouble shooting with no luck and finally opted to return it to the store I purchased it from thinking it was faulty. The store gave me a brand new computer and for about the first 24 hours it seemed to be working fine - started the software load, and file transfer and it started freezing up just like the last computer. Removed everything I installed and any registry entries with no change - the computer froze randomly. After about a week of messing around with the thing and trying to troubleshoot with help from HP I returned this computer to the store too and picked up another computer that was totally different than this one. My new computer is a quad core Pentium and it works just fine. I think this may be a situation where the hardware isn't compatible with Windows Vista as advertised. Maybe it works fine with XP but if you're running Vista or intend to in the future go with another box.
I run a business and can not run it due to this computer. I have lost 8 months worth of income and I have spent more hours working on this thing then one would even imagine is possible. So in the process here is what I am prepared to do I'm not sure what with:
Paragon 9.0 Professional backup & Easues Partition Master. I thought that if I was able to take an exact image of the drive that has the recovery information on it and then copied it to the drive that was free that it would solve the problem. So earlier today I did that and now the other drive shows the exact same problem, it's totally full too?? So will doing partitions help that? I have no clue but I got the software...
I have backed up the computer and I guess I just am not sure where to turn. Is this shot? Am I wasting more time? Should I do a complete systems recovery and if I do how do I make sure that I have everything from the computer safe as some of my programs were downloads that I registered and don't have all the keys or the disc's to reload... Should I go to Windows XP and if so how... I also have had a consultant come in to install Microsoft SQL Server for a Contact Management Data Base that I run. I don't know that I can re-install that on my own and do not want to loose it. I do have two external backup drives to use as well.
Even little things like just typing this in here is weird. I can type and type and it shows nothing and then all of the sudden it will fill in. Same thing if I left click to do a cut or paste, it reacts very very slowly.

Answer 1

Hi,
Get your critical data backed to external storage.  Do you have a set of the HP recovery disks?
Is your system running in RAID mode? If yes, RAID 1 or RAID 0
How many physical hard drives are in your PC? 
When you open My Computer, how many hard drives do you see and what is the size?
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