Legit Reviews

I'm back to trying to trouble shoot by broke down POS computer and am curious how to check a PSU to see if it's good, bad or on the way out? I've got an Antec NEO Power 480 watt PSU that has served me well and now I'm thinking that my recent failure could be caused by my PSU.

Here's a quick and dirty as to what has been going on with my pc:

Video Card started whinning really loud and then upon booting my computer would start out with a dashed gray bar at the bottom of my screen and after 10 minutes it would move to the Windows splash screen and sit there for a few minutes and then reboot itself. I moved the Video Card over to another pc and it works like a charm. I haven't tested my memory, although I did attempt to boot up with one module at a time by removing each stick, hoping that if I had a bad stick then it would identify itself by not booting up. I got the same result everytime...10 minutes of the gray bar and then rebooting once it made it to the windows splash screen. One another thing that I always thought was odd, was when I did swap my video card around and tried to boot it would always give me an error message stating that I had no OS loaded. I would unplug the IDE cable from the motherboard and HD and then reboot and it would load up. That was, of course, prior to the whole rebooting issues as identified above.

My thoughts are that the motherboard is dead, but I have no way of testing it to make sure, so if there is a way that I can check the other components to rule them out then I would be very grateful.

Thanks,

Razorbacx

Sounds like either the IDE controller on the board or the hard dive itself. Move the drive to the other IDE channel, or even to another PC and see if it boots any faster.

I've swapped the IDE channel and got the same result. It could be the IDE channel as simply reseating it always seemed to work until now. The HD itself worked flawlessly prior to all of this as it was my secondary drive. Wouldn't there have been some type of indication that the drive was dying?

I wouldn't call it a dead board until I tried the other ide controller, I just got back from a puter doing the same exact thing, forever to get into XP, then as soon as it splashed blue screen flash and reboot. Did a repair from the XP disk, same thing. Blanked the HD reloaded XP + drivers went right into windows.

Video card was making a strange noise going into the splash screen, after blank and reload no noise. Then both cdroms started opening and closing on their own (on same ide channel) pulled the older cdrom, connected the burner to the same channel the HD was on and the problems went away.

I never call a board dead until I try a fresh install of windows, you wouldn't believe the number of times a faulty driver, or OS file can cause untold mayhem.

Good luck with it!

I already reinstalled Windows XP, twice, and the problem still persists. I first tried a repair and that did not work, then I did a complete reinstall and that did not work, so I tried it a second time and still nothing. As a matter of fact I spent over 8 hours on the phone with Microsoft India (Tech Support) thinking that it might be software related and nothing worked.

I do appreciate the ideas and welcome every one of them.

Razorbacx