My computer is randomly shutting off. Power light is staying on.

[ravenscourge]

Hi. I have run into a major problem the last few days, and I am starting to get extremely worried. My computer is randomly shutting down almost completely. It started just as an odd anomaly Saturday night, but by Sunday night it was sometimes cutting off as quickly as 4 minutes after booting.) During seemingly anything (video streaming/gaming/opening safe mode/etc.) the PC will go dead, but the blue power LED remains on, and a fan seems to stay on at least temporarily, as there is still air coming out of the back of the pc. I can not hold down the button to turn off the pc if this happens, I have no choice but to completely pull the plug. Today I took a compressed air can and completely cleaned every speck of dust out of the interior of the tower (it had sucked in a ton of dust) and I thought that may fix it, but no, it shut off again after about 45 minutes of use after work.

Info on my PC:

Gateway Desktop (~14-15 months old, bought new at Best Buy)
Radeon 4600 4Gig Gfx Card
8 MB Ram
Vista 64-Bit
1TB HD
2400 Mhz Dual Core AMD

Please let me know anything else I can provide. I'm dying for help here, as if it doesn't end up being related to overheating, as it seems not to be, I'm just completely lost. Please help, and TY!

 

[rolli59]

One of two things, Motherboard or PSU failing.

 

[jsc]

I'd guess that the PSU is more likely to be the problem.

 

[ravenscourge]

Update. Thanks guys, I just now got the email that I had responses.

First, to answer previous poster:

1) NB temp on reboot was about 64 C. CPU and HD temps at this time were about 45 C. This is after shutdown, with plugging the pc back in and going straight to BIOS to check it.

To update the situation, the problem is worse now. I bought a new, heavy duty CPU cooling system with twin fans. Turns out it was too big for the case, but I got it installed. However, the PC never turned on again. After plugging it in, the fans turned on, but no lights, no display, no beep, just completely dead. That's my sole argument for why I don't think it's the power supply, as power is getting to the fans. I am positive that somewhere trying to install this nightmare of a fan I (perhaps further?) damaged the motherboard or the processor in some way. I took the fan back out and easily installed the stock fan, but still nothing.

I have not really considered the power supply. My thought after a lot of googling was the board shutting down because the "NB Temp" was getting too high?

My next course of action is I'm going to buy a new motherboard/processor combo, and try them out. Of course, I've never changed a motherboard, and only removed a processor once, so I'm a little daunted by n00bdom at that.

Also note the PC has never been overclocked in any way.