Booting Problem!!

[imported_hobbes]

I have a four year old desktop computer...
The configuration is:
Athlon XP 1.6
512MB DDR
40GB HDD
MSI Motherboard..
WIN2K

The problem is that it just wont boot.

The symptoms started showing up few days back, when it used to restart on its own suddenly when I loaded some applicaion. (It did not show me the blue screen of death though)
The problem then graduated to a booting problem, when it would freeze in different stages of the boot sequence or windows load... there was no specific place where it got stuck -- sometimes while checking the RAM, sometimes while loading the drives.. .and sometimes when loading Windows. The workaround that I used was a hard reset, hoping that it would not get stuck again! That seemed to work for sometime.

But now, it just wont start booting. The monitor does not get any signal at all.
When I turn on the power, I can see the fans turning on and the cd drives get power (I can eject the tray), but the boot does not happen.
I have tried removing the CMOS backup cell and reseting the memory, but that doesnt help.

This seems to be a SMPS (PSU) problem... maybe the motherboard is not getting power.... but how can I be sure? are there some checks that can be done?
Or is there the possiblity that there can be some other problem?

Thanks in advance!

 

[firerock]

It seems like your psu is dying. The best way to test it is to borrow your friend's PSU and test it. BTW, try to change your cmos cell, it might be dying as well.