Pc Problem

Hi All

The pc i am using to write this has been acting up of late - which is fine cause it is due to be replaced soon (it a p4 3.06Ghz- so its had a fair life)

Because i have a baby due in 5 days , i am in no mood to go shopping for a pc at the moment so i am hoping the Problem is just the Ps as i suspect and i will just replace it and wait till i am off work to chase up a pc

So put your Diagnostic hats on and tell me your opinions

 

It has been resetting itself and then hanging on the packard bell screen (before windows gets a chance to load)with no HDD activity at all

Have to turn it off at the wall and keep trying to turn it back on till randomly it will load up to windows

As i mentioned i think its the PS but if you have any other ideas i would like to hear them

Sounds like a good starting point, if you have a multi meter you can always check the i/p to the HDD, 12v and 5v whilst its under load.

A multimeter will show the voltage but not how clean it is, a dying PSU is usually due to dying capacitors which result in a very noisy power rail.

 

My money would be on the PSU and then on the hard drive, but start at the PSU as its logical to do so, and easy to do.

could be a psu.... might be a hdd on it way out

 

check all the basics first

 

rip the covers off

 

shove ya fingers in the fans so they dont turn and blow it out with a high pressure air cleaner

 

if u dont stop the fans spining the blades will fly appart and decintergrate .... trust me on this one ;)

 

also remove the ram chips and clean the gold connectors with a standard white pencil eraser

 

reseat all cables/plugs

 

proably wound be a bad idea to *CAREFULLY* remove the cpu fan, clean the heat sink off and put back on a *TINY* amount

 

reassemeble.

 

leave the cover off so u can see/hear whats going and turn it on

 

shove a finger on the *SIDE* of the hdd and see if u can feel it *kick* when the power comes on as it spins up

 

try that for starters and see how ya go

thanks for the suggestions guys

Will look further at the PS

could potentionally be ram, due to the fact that it's hanging at the dell screen which is where it would be testing the ram. But a heat issue would be where I would be looking first, purely due to the resetting of the machine

could potentionally be ram, due to the fact that it's hanging at the dell screen which is where it would be testing the ram. But a heat issue would be where I would be looking first, purely due to the resetting of the machine

 

It resets when its been on for a while but it will hang even after it has been off for an hour

Would this point away from a heat issue:unsure

Might i ask what OP system you are running? I was having very similar issues with my machine....and after much frustration, consternation....and of course the usual sheer rage, I managed to get it down to certain vista updates conflicting with some of the other progs I had installed at the time Have you tried a system restore to before your last windows updates?

Have you tried booting without giving your HDDs any power? Might be worthwhile checking to see if you can successfully get past POST every time depending on the HDDs connected. There's also the RAM issue, as well as the PSU - if you have a spare, swap PSUs and experiment with your RAM as well. All good options to look at.

 

Good luck!

Yeh could be, either caps in the PSU or those clustered around the CPU on the mainboard. Somehow this plague of bad caps had totally passed me by until last weekend when Mrs Wombles complaints about the PVR got to a level that was annoying me. The device would lock up and freeze, or it would boot and act normally but say it have 0% disk space left, you could select a recording to play but it would exit after the 1st frame and from time to time the remote wouldnt work at all.

 

Took the lid off and found 2 very concave 2200uF 10V electros in the PSU section, they should have an ESR of about 0.01ohms, this pair were 1.2 and 1.5 ohms. Replace them with a couple from a scrapped TV chassis and the PVR is rock solid again.

 

If this is the problem I hope the caps are in the PSU section, removing them from the mainboard will be a pain due to the multilayered nature of modern boards.