broken PC please help

Robc1880

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Jun 13, 2002
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Can somebody shed some light on my problem. I can turn on my pc and it will start to boot up and then the neon lights in the front, the green light on my mobo, and the light on my case fan on the window they all start blinking and then it almost sounds like my hard drive makes a noise that starts to get faster with the RPM's and once it starts to pick up the whole system shuts down. I don't think the system is drawing too much power since everything is at stock speeds, but i'm not sure. Would this be a faulty PSU, hard drive, or something else? TIA for any help you can give.

System Specs:
Abit NF7-S v2.0
AXP 2600 barton with stock cooling
ATI 9700np
mitsumi floppy drive
lite on CD Burner 52x32x52
WD 80gb hard drive caviar edition
Generic case with generic 450W PSU

Remember, there are no stupid questions, just stupid people.
 
PSU could be failing, OS could have gotten screwed also.
Hard to tell. What happened right before this started happening? Did your system crash, then this started?
A 300watt PS should work fine for your requirements as far as booting goes.

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Thanks for the quick reply. I was using it on monday just looking at stuff on the internet and e-mail and then turned it off. I then turned it on on Tuesday and it started to do this right away on the bootup. Does this still sound like the PSU is screwing up? BTW the pc is running Win XP with SP1.

Remember, there are no stupid questions, just stupid people.
 
I can't think of any one component that would act like that except a power supply.

Abit IS7 - 3.0C @ 3.6ghz - Mushkin PC4000 (2 X 512) - Sapphire 9800Pro - TT 420 watt Pure Power
Samsung 120gb ATA-100 - Maxtor 40gb ATA - 100
Sony DRU-510A - Yellowtail Merlot
 
It probably is the psu, but it could also be a device that is drawing too much load. Before going to buy a new psu, try unpluging your hdds, optical drives, and all cards except the graphics card. See if it gets to bios. If everything is fine, add one device at a time, until it fails again. Then take everything back out, and see if the last thing you put in, causes a problem again.
I've had a shorted nic, some soundblaster cards, and no end of optical, floppy, and hdds cause that kind of problem.
If you have a spare graphics card, you may want to try that as well, though the only graphics cards that have been a problem like that, have been oc'ed too far just before.
 
thanks endyen, I will try your advice and give that a shot. Thanks to everyone for their advice on the problem.

Remember, there are no stupid questions, just stupid people.