Computer Woes

hippofant

We have an old computer in our house, a hand-me-down from my days in university. It's an old AMD K7 2600, with 1 GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon, and my brother's using it now. Except he's having an issue where it just powers off while it's booting. The hard drive'll beep, and then click, the whole thing just powers off. It does so in such a way that you have to tap the power button twice to get it to power back up, and it'll occasionally happen while loading Windows or shortly after, but after Windows has been loaded for a couple minutes, then the rig's good to go for the rest of the day.

Has anybody experienced this before and can tell me what it is? We don't want to buy a new computer, since it'd totally overshoot his needs and would cost a significant amount of money, but I think we'd be okay with fixing it if the cost is low. I suspect it's the power supply, but I don't really have much hardware experience. Halp?

Soggychicken

Sounds like it's overheating. The beeping you're hearing maybe the motherboard's heat warning.

Try to boot into BIOS to see if there's a temperature monitoring page. Let us know how hot it's running.

hippofant

Soggychicken wrote: »

Sounds like it's overheating. The beeping you're hearing maybe the motherboard's heat warning.

Try to boot into BIOS to see if there's a temperature monitoring page. Let us know how hot it's running.

It's at the beginning of the day, turning it on for the first time. Core and MB temps are 40 and 35 C even after a few tries, so...
it's not overheating.

Inquisitor77

Might be a power issue.

My recommendation is to spend the $300 to get a very low-end system. You can probably save more money if you don't get a new monitor, etc. It would still be an upgrade from what he's using now, and it saves you the hours of tech support required to keep his current system running.

Dixon

Try reseating stuff, it may be having trouble picking something up and freaking out. Does it give you an error message in the event log?

Otherwise it looks like a PSU issue, you could check it with a volt meter if you want. You can check online if your unsure of how to do it

illig

look at the motherboard and see if the capacitors are bulging/leaking... mobos from that era had the counterfeit capacitor issue, and that generally causes issues like you're having

hippofant

illig wrote: »

look at the motherboard and see if the capacitors are bulging/leaking... mobos from that era had the counterfeit capacitor issue, and that generally causes issues like you're having

Eugh, how do I do that? I'm not entirely familiar with what a capacitor even looks like.

yotes

Check out badcaps.net for capacitor porn.

illig

hippofant wrote: »

illig wrote: »

look at the motherboard and see if the capacitors are bulging/leaking... mobos from that era had the counterfeit capacitor issue, and that generally causes issues like you're having

Eugh, how do I do that? I'm not entirely familiar with what a capacitor even looks like.

check out the pics at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

do yours look like that?

hippofant

Hmm. That does seem to be the problem. The symptoms are correct, and the capacitors are bulging a bit at the top. I guess now we just have to decide whether it's worth getting fixed.

Thanks!