Things started out with a random reboot while I was away from the computer. Soon after the first reboot I was browsing the web and it did it again. This time I wanted to shut it down when it got to the log on screen so I hit shut down and it restarted again before it had a chance to. I hit the power button while windows was booting up this time around and it got to the log on screen and then displayed ‘windows is shutting down’ before it rebooted again. Thinking its never gonna shut down I turned off the power strip to shut it off.
Things were pretty dusty so I blew everything out and cleaned it up thinking something was maybe overheating.
Got everything back together and hit the power button and it ran for a few seconds and shut down, I don’t even think it got to post or the beeps.
Tried again and it shut down even faster, noticed that the fan was not running on the video card so I disconnected the cards aux power connector and tried starting it again. It shut off as soon as the fans started to reach full speed.
This is a 5 year old system that has ran 24/7 most of the time, it seems to be something power related. Should the video card fan come on immediately at startup? Its an ATI Radeon 9500 pro (agp). The fan seems to have too much resistance when turning by hand too. Any suggestions on diagnosing the problem?
Its set to not turn back on by itself when the power returns after an outage so its restarting by itself makes me think its not the power supply thats killing it but rather something in the motherboard.
its an asus nforce2 motherboard with an athlon 2500+ and antec 350W psu.
Oil by itself is like corn, useless. The bacon adds to the oil, I could also make unsubstantiated claims similar to the oil additives at autozone saying that it could easily make your car get 11ity+ more MPG and that the chunks of bacon will physically break up any carbon buildup.
So either a tasty super laxative.
Or a super oil, with no science to back such up.
To see if the PS is failing or completly gone, try to take out a bunch of the PCI boards and extra hard drives. My old desktop had this issue for a while when if only the one HD was plugged in it would work but any more devices and it would not start.
If that doesn’t allow it to turn on, try ot find someone with a similar PS and try it.
Could be the PSU, but it still sounds like something is overheating…possibly the CPU. Have any thermal paste handy? It’s always good to reapply some. IF you do, make sure you clean the old thermal paste off the heatsink and CPU. I used one of those lens cleaning towelettes. They contain a little bit of alcohol, make sure you dry them off really good with a polish cloth or I used a car shammy.
it took a couple of tries to get it going but currently running with only one hd, cpu fan, mobo and video card plugged in. the +5 V supply is averaging 4.93 with a low of 4.87, can’t remember what it was running before. Is this out of the ordinary?
I’ll try plugging more in to get it to fail again.
edit… haha while in the process of shutting down it restarted again. I think it actually did it several times really quick.
It wouldn’t say that windows is shutting down if it were the PSU.
It would just shut off, or restart. (most likely restart)
Overheating is my guess.
can you just get it to POST and get in BIOS?
5V Rails? that’s pretty shitty imo. Even for 5 years ago.
but if it were, that’s within norm.
Silly question, but have you checked for viruses?
Or can you not even get in to safe mode to check it?
If you let it idle in BIOS and watch the CPU temps (and any other temps your BIOS lets you monitor) you can see if something is overheating…
Then if it borks up while you’re in BIOS, most likely not a virus.
My guess is overheating too…probably the CPU, maybe the Graphics card…but he said that he was able to boot with limited hardware connections…which led me to believe he’s got a bum PSU.
Bacon is also >*