PC powering itself down

[stratocaster27]

Hey PC Forum,
Ive been having an issue over the last few weeks with my PC powering itself down. At first, it was only happening during a gaming session, but now I'm having a hard time keeping it running. My first thought is that something is overheating. After a thorough dusting, some things are running a bit cooler, but the problem persists.

I can sit fine idle for hours, but when in use, I hear a whirring electronic noise just before shutdown. I don't get any kind of bsod or errors, just the hardware whizzing sound before it completely powers down. Have tried to pinpoint where the sound is coming from, but i cant really tell. It sounds the same as when you flip the PSU switch, which i have to do everytime this happens.

My Logisys 550w PSU is only a couple years old, and the newest piece of hardware I've added. Maybe a sign the PSU is dieing? I will be replacing the thermal paste on my heatsink, which has been there since i put this rig together.

Tried some other troubleshooting as well. In the event log, i saw an atapi error before every shutdown. I did try disabling the cd drive/reinstalling its drivers. Other than that, i ran checkdisk, which did fix a few orphaned files. I'm out of troubleshooting ideas other than removing the hardware and checking if its stable.

Running xp pro sp3, some other specs are included in the temperatures screen i am attaching. All these idle temps look fine to me, but then i am not that experienced for this stuff. Has anyone had similar problems like having to reset the psu after system power downs?

Thanks everyone for your time reading

 

[johnb35]

The logisys psu is your issue. It's a cheap unit and won't push much. What are your exact system specs?

cpu
video card
processor
memory
and so on

Just noticed some of your hardware is listed in the screen shot. Definately sounds like you have a bad unit. Get it replaced immediately with like a cx500 corsair power supply.

 

[stratocaster27]

Thanks for looking, heres my system specs

MB- Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2HP
CPU- AMD Athlon 7750 duo black edition
MEM- Kingston 2x2GB HyperX ddr2
HD- Western Digital Caviar Blue 80GB
GPU- Radeon HD 4350 512mb

 

[johnb35]

Replace the power supply with a known good one. The power supply is the backbones of your system, so don't skimp on it to save money because you will end up spending more money later on. With your specs either one of these will suffice.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139026

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817371045

Borrow a unit from a friend if you can first just to test.

 

[stratocaster27]

Thanks again for your reply and psu recommendation. Will be looking into replacing this logisys pretty soon.

 

[StrangleHold]

With the sound its making I would say the power supply too. Like said above Logisys are pretty low end power supplies. Other then that there a small possibilty that a choke could be going out on the motherboard.

 

[stratocaster27]

I did forget to mention after one of the reboots following the lock up, windows did not recognize that i had a hard drive installed and asked me to boot from a cd. Another reboot fixed it, but i only got that error once.

I tried to pinpoint the whizzing noise with my case open, and noticed its not coming from the psu, but the front of the case where the hard drive is.

The drive is probably the oldest piece of equip in my rig, ive been reusing it since about 02'. This is also not a complete power down. My system just locks up seconds after i hear the whizzing noise. Could this be the HD going out instead of the PSU issue?

 

[stratocaster27]

Ended up recording that chirping sound and threw it on soundcloud for easy access. Im hoping these arent hard drive screams for mercy. You can hear the very distinct sound around 1 second in, and then the system beep. Anyone recognize these chirping/whizzing noises?
:/

https://soundcloud.com/djpleiades/whizzzz

 

[StrangleHold]

Sounds like a harddrive to me.

 

[stratocaster27]

Ran diskcheckup self-test with no luck, not sure if selfcheck is even supported. It would not continue due to a fatal error.

As soon as i enabled recording SMART attributes my system shut down. Only 3 minutes have passed since my bootup, and i already have 3 read/write errors.

Will attach diskcheckup's report in a new post.

 

[stratocaster27]

Maybe someone can make something of this diskcheck report, there are quite alot of errors.

 

[johnb35]

Wow. If you had said the hard drive was 11 years old in the beginning, that would have been a dead giveaway right there. Replace the Hard drive and the power supply.