Computer not booting...

[Catalyst18]

Problem with parents' system: When power is pressed, the system cycles on-off every 3 seconds, as is evidenced by the optical drive lights repeatedly flashing. With just the processor, ram, and optical drives hooked up, it still does the same thing. I tried switching out the ram. No dice. Even without the video card, it keeps doing the same thing.

This system is an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ system based on a ECS K7S5A, with 256mb of sdr ram, stock heatsink, MSI mx440 video card and a "Deer Computer Co." 300w power supply.

I'm thinking power supply, but it smells fine and has run fine for its entire four-year life. What do you guys think?

 

[thecrecarc]

derr computer co? what they make deer hunting parts also?

 

[montag451]

i would think psu.

but,
could try dosconnecting EVERYTHING except cpu/psu/ram/vga. clear the bios, then reboot - see if anything changes
if not, take vga out,
if not, take ram out.
let us know what happens

 

[allanon1965]

my hunch is the motherboard, that board has had a lot of problems since it came out, i bought 3 of them when they first came out, none of the three lasted more than a year, hell the first one quit after 2 months, they had an issue with bad caps.....i replaced them with asrock boards in the same cases,psu's,ram.cpu's,etc.....end of problems.

 

[Cha0s]

cmos battery?

 

[Catalyst18]

Montag, I tried all of that, and still nothing. Allanon, that's good to know. And yeah, I do buy my computer parts from Cabela's...

Thanks for the help.