Friends comp is fubar'd

[TwinAphex]

My friend is running a asus a7n8x with a xp 2200 and some regular ram and regular power supply, just recently his power supply out of nowhere started to smoke and burned out after just days of use, he returned and got another one from the same store. A couple days ago his wife said the computer started smoking again and she unpluged a black cord and she heared a pop a little after. I inspected the mobo and there appears to be nothing blown off, everything looks to be intact. Now our issue is it refuses to stay in windows longer than 2-3 mins. We can enter using safe mode and we tried restoring to a past point which was successfull for all of ten minutes in non safe mode usage. Nothing is getting hot, in the bios while we sit the temp for the cpu sits around 43-45c.

He has had this combo for about 2 years now and has always had issues with random reboots , but nothing very severe.

Any help and suggestiongs would be appreciated

 

[themusgrat]

It probably is either that the mobo is bad, and has never been stable becaue of power issues and has finally decided to screw up bigtime, or maybe the PSU is not powerful enough, and the mobo is trying to pulll more power than it can safely supply. Get or borrow a more powerful one and see if that works. Also, what are the system components?

 

[2kfire]

Sounds like power supply. Usually, when a mobo component goes, the mobo won't work at all. Also, you'd be able to see a blown cap or burnt inductor etc. Try following themusgrat's suggestions, and please post more info about your computer (RAM, video card, PSU brand, etc.)

 

[TwinAphex]

doesn't matter anymore he just picked up ecs board and no probs whatsoever. We just went with themusgrat suggestion that his board was bad because it was the most logical aside from the fact he's gone through 3 noname psu. thx again

 

[themusgrat]

Sweet, happy gaming.