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Cohiba · Posted: Sun Jan 28, 2007 7:22 pm Post subject: Rare computer question

Ok, I'm pretty sure I've diagnosed the problem but thought i'd still ask here. Last night my computer started something weird it would not shutdown. It would go all the way down and you would hear it power down for the briefest of seconds and come right back on sort of like a normal reboot. First thought i had just hit reboot instead of shutdown but when it did it a second time i knew something was up. Did the ole hold in the power button to get it to power off, it wouldn't it would blink off and come back on. did that like 3-4 times before it finnaly shut off. Today i powered it on all good went to shut it down again same thing happened but this time it refused to power off, so i hit the switch in the back of the power supply. I let it sit a few hours thinking wtf is going on. Then went to check my email tonight i turned it back on and it sounded like it was almost getting to post when Blink it would restart so i started pulling components the video card, the raid card etc.. trying to make it do something other than Beep and blink the power and start over about every 10 seconds. So finnaly I had everything disconected and turned just the power supply on. Yea i'm pretty sure my powersupply has Nuked itself. I'm hoping that it is just the powersupply and it didn't take the motherboard with it. Also since Best Buy closed at 6 my pc is dead till at least tomorrow thankfully its not my night to post stats... But may need someone to take my shift this week if ends up not being Just the monster powersupply that had just barely gone out of its 3 year warranty..
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mohrorless · Posted: Sun Jan 28, 2007 7:41 pm Post subject: Re: Rare computer question

JerWA · Prince Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 1497 Location: WA, USA

Yeah, sounds like a power supply issue to me. I'd say fire up a monitoring util to see what the output voltages are, it's probably fluctuating and other such nonsense that would give it away.

Good luck with it. Put something uber in there. Cool

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Cohiba · Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 7:48 am Post subject:

JerWA · Prince Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 1497 Location: WA, USA

I dunno, I gave up on power calcs. My new system has 375 watts, with 2 burners, graphics (7900 GS), and sound cards, but only 1 HDD for now (other drive is still in my other machine from when we moved from TX and I'm too lazy to move it w/o a good reason). Guess the Core 2's are pretty good about power consumption hehe. Not much going on with cooling either, only one exhaust and one intake, both rarely ever on. It's creepy quiet compared to my uber-fans-of-doom (82 cfm... 3 of them, plus 3 other slower fans) box sitting next to it lol.
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Cohiba · Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 1:07 pm Post subject:

And the debugging continues...

Threw in a new Power Supply, now turns on and stays on.. BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!!!

I now have some wonderful bios beep error codes.. So now i'm googling bios beep codes the darn thing does it so quick its hard to tell what exactly the beep code is.
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Sir Doune · Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 1:46 pm Post subject:

Unfortunately, your PS problem may taken your mainboard with it. I had this happen recently. I thought it was a monitor cable issue. It was an ARCING issue between the mainboard and that big 24 pin power connector. When I pulled the system apart there were three pins that were burned on the mainboard connector.

Over the almost 20 years I have been building them I have had more problems with Power Supplies, memory and hard drives (in that order) than anything else with my PCs.

If you can find the same model mainboard you might NOT have to reinstall your OS.
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Cohiba · Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 3:50 pm Post subject:

Tenebra · Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 4:37 pm Post subject:

Well start with the power supply first. At work, the power supply of a PC burned, but fortunately nothing was damaged. Mb, disks, etc. all are in good working order.
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Fart in your gen direxion · Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 6:18 pm Post subject:

I blew up a PS last weekend, everthing was ok, just ps went Cool

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Cohiba · Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 6:47 pm Post subject:

IT LIVES!!!

#Big smile

Ya would think after 20 years of putting computers together i wouldn't have made this bone head mistake. PSU did blow up so my new 550 is purring nicely..

But my bios error codes were because i didn't quite put the video card in all the way... DOH!!

At least i didn't fry anything.. Been there done that!!.
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Sir Papa Smurph · Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 8:10 pm Post subject:

JerWA · Prince Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 1497 Location: WA, USA

Yeah, and from everything I've read nobody actually outputs the power they sell except a few specific brands that are 4x as expensive as anyone else (wonder why). The system I'm on now is prebuilt, I got tired of messing with things. 375 watts is the smallest PSU I've had since, eh... my last Pentium 3 I think lol.
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mohrorless · Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 9:00 pm Post subject:

Quixote · Duke Joined: 06 Nov 2006 Posts: 355 Location: Aaaargh!

Felicitations!
On one Old Clone in particular - I named it "Calamity Jane" I had all forms of weird behaviour until ...duh: The rack's back was not square with the side where the cards plugged: so any movement would pull one or another out of contact. Confused

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JONB · Posted: Mon Mar 19, 2007 3:26 pm Post subject:

A late contribution to this debate. My PC will NOT restart by itself. Powers off ok but if it needs to reboot for any reason, upgrade to a program or whatever....No joy! Justs hangs on the final windows screen. I have to hold the power button and restart the machine manually. Any genius out there with an idea as to what the **** is going on?
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mohrorless · Posted: Mon Mar 19, 2007 4:01 pm Post subject:

JerWA · Prince Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 1497 Location: WA, USA

Most likely it's an application not responding to the reboot request. There are lots of ways to respond to that request that will make Windows pop up a box asking if you want to kill the program, but if it simply ignores the request Windows is stymied. How dumb is that?

Before you reboot, try exiting everything you can, and then killing as many processes as possible in task manager. If telling it to reboot works after that, you know it's an application being a poohead.
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Sir Papa Smurph · Posted: Mon Mar 19, 2007 5:20 pm Post subject:

You may be able to find out which app is hanging in Administrative Tools. go to Control panel/ Administrative Tools. Look under application or system. In addition you may want to clean your registry using either EasyCleaner or CCleaner. Both are Freeware. I use both, and they are safe. ( Just DO NOT use the "Duplicate file cleaner in EasyCleaner unless you know what you are doing. You can hose the OS )
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mohrorless · Posted: Mon Mar 19, 2007 5:56 pm Post subject: