intermittant problems starting up -- bad PS?

[ddreams]

My girlfriends machine (Celeron 466 I put together a couple years ago) is having problems.

Occasionally it will refuse to power on (won't even get to an initial bios screen). It has been happening for some time, and would happen maybe 25% of the time she turned the box on. Lately it happens much more freqeuntly.

When it happens, pulling the side panel off and starting it up seems to fix the problem, she can then replace the pnael and the machine will run fine until it's powered off (rarely more then 7 or 8 hours running at a time).

I can't remember the case brand, though it was a well recommended "cheap case" about 2 years ago, and I used whatever power supply came with it....

Does this seem indicitive of a bad power supply? Worth replacing to see if it fixes it? I initally thought a short somewhere in the case or a mis-ground board, but those don't seem as likely any more...

Any help is much appreciated...

 

[UnixFreak]

Often, if removing the case makes a difference, a ground issue could certainly be present. What I would do, is remove the motherboard, and clean the contacts,
with a wire brush (if there is visible corrosion present, but I doubt it) and a pencil eraser. Make sure the motherboard has at the least, 3 points at which it grounds at the
chassis. Then, if it still does it, put in a power supply from your machine. If you still have the problem, its your switch. Keep us informed on what happens.

 

[ddreams]

I was a bit vague about what it does -- in addition to "refusing to power on", it'll emit long steady beeps that don't seem to correspond to a beep code per-se...

I'll double check and make sure there are multiple ground points, if that fails I'll swap in my Sparkle power supply and see if that helps, it seems to happen often enough now it should be easy to see what works.

Will keep you all posted, though I won't have a chance to work on the box until this weekend.