Bit of help please!

[Straz]

Hi guys,

I've got a problem with my PC, not sure if this is the correct place to post but here it is anyway. Any suggestions are welcome.

Basically i'll take you through what's happened and what i've done so far:

Firstly I started my computer up one morning, and got no BIOS beep - So I rebuilt the PC, and it started.

It happened again the next day, and I knew it wasn't anything not seated properly so I took the BIOS battery out, waited a few seconds and put it in, and it started.

Ok so I did this for a few days but it's got to the stage now where even doing that doesn't get it to start, so I started the process of ruling out problems with the hardware - tried the RAM, seems ok, not 100% on the graphics card yet, but basically it's completely random if it starts or not.

I thought it was dead this morning but in the end i started it up without the graphics card connected and obviously got the display BIOS beep, so I put the card back in and the computer started...

Funny thing is once I get it started it runs very smooth, the GFX, the RAM and CPU I think are all running correctly, i'm completely baffled to why it's doing this and don't have any parts to test an alternative CPU or Mobo.

Here's what i'm using at the moment:

ASUS A8N-E Motherboard
AMD 64 San Diego 3700+
1024Mb G.Skill ZX
ATI Radeon Connect3D X1800XT
450W ThermalTake PurePower PSU
Seagate Barracude 120Gb IDE HD

That's about all of it I think, any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[Straz]

bump

 

[artaxerxes]

Start up issues like this are often an indicator of a gradual failure of the PSU. All power suplies degrade in the max power they can output year on year. What used to be stable, becomes flaky. The PSU is put under greatest strain at start up.

This seems to fit with your symptoms. See if you can borrow a more powerful PSU from someone else to test the hypothesis... or try removing devices from yours to see if you get reliable boot up... i.e. extra HDDs, opticals, and power drawing cards, fans.

 

[Straz]

Thanks for that, oh I also forgot to add - I had a surge protector running at the time but I know they're not 100% protection, anyway it might just be coincidence but it happened after some lightning we had here. So I don't know if something could have been blown, if so any idea what it could be?

 

[artaxerxes]

Test the surge protector if you can, it may of been sacrificed to save your system. To eliminate it from our investigations see if you can repeat the problem on another known good socket, without the surge protector.