Help with diagnoses

E

Eddie Haskell

New Member
I have a computer that all of a sudden kept restarting on it's own. I was getting no post noises out of the ordinary, just a sigle beep as it came to life. I tried to start it in safe mode but got the same results (restart after restart) I was thinking virus so I did a fresh install only to have the same results only this time I would get the "your system has recovered from a serious error" message...over and over again and once in a while I would get the "your system had problems, what would you like to do" and it gave me the safe mode, last known good confiuration, start windows normally, etc, etc choices. None of these choices seem to make any difference.
I took out each stick of ram, one at a time to see if one of them was causing the issue but no luck, actually the machine has no data leaving the video card anymore, it starts but all it does is run the fans, nothing on the screen at all (I tried different video cards, same results).
I'm pretty sure the MOBO is dead but I don't want to throw money at this thing if it isn't going to fix anything, I plan on building a new computer soon so If I can get by with a cheap simple fix that would be super. I know it will be hard for someone not sitting in front of it to diagnose the problem.
It has an MSI K7N2 MOBO, AMD XP cpu, Apacer ram (2x256) 350W power supply, XP Home (SP2).
I'm not sure what else I can give you now that the thing has all but died, any help or opinions would be great.
 
Do what Prae says and run memtest once through see if it gives any errors. You might also want to think about upgrading your PSU.
 
Even though I get power to all the fans? I'm not good at figuring out hardware issues but I would think that if the fans spin the PSU is working. Is there a way that a VOM would tell me if it's the problem? What is the best way to tell for sure if the PSU is the issue? Sorry for all the questions but I want to get this thing back up and running at the lowest possible price...Thanks for your responses.
By the way I've never run Memtest before but I would think the PC would still have to be in some kind of working order for me to use it. This thing does nothing but spin the fans at this point.
 
Well if nothing more than fans spinnning that mean CPU not powered on meaning either mobo or PSU is getting in the way of the CPU getting power ... PSU is easier and cheaper to check :)
 
Update!

I just wanted to thank you folks for pointing me in the right direction, turns out I had 2 issues at once (go figure). I changed out the power supply and the computer started to restart by itself again, I know that doesn't sound good but then I swapped each stick of ram (Apacer) with a known good stick and as it turns out one of them was bad causing the restart issue but it's all good now and I'm typing this message on it! Happy New Year and thanks again!
 
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