start up troubles on Gateway

[dboy]

My parents have a p3 (450 mhz) Gateway desktop, about 12-15 months old. Occasionally it doesn't want to turn on. When you press the power button, the fans etc start, but after a second (or up to 5-10 seconds) it shuts back down. After a number of tries it will eventually stay on. Once it's running there are no problems. I've noticed that it only shuts down before it gets to where it checks the hard drive - once you hear the HD starting up, you know you're ok. Any idea what could be causing this?

 

[OhioDude]

Did it just start doing this recently? Did it start after adding or changing hardware?

Here are some possiblities:

Could very well be power supply.
Could also be a bad/dirty power switch.
I had a system act similarly and it was a bad cable connection between the NIC and the Wake-on-LAN MB header. If your parents use cable or DSL for their internet connection and have a NIC, you may want to disconnect the Wake-on-LAN header if it is being used and disable it in the BIOS. If they have a modem, you may also want to try disabling Wake-on-Modem if the BIOS supports it and it is enabled.

These are just a few ideas. I could be totally off base, too... I'd probably be leaning towards the power supply since you said once it starts the disk drive, it works fine. Could be that trying to start the platters spinning puts just enough strain on the PS to cause voltages to drop below tolerance enough to shut it down.

 

[dboy]

I suspect the PS - gateway only thought to provide a 200 or 230 W one (forget which off hand)... It has only been doing this for the last couple months though, they haven't added any new hardware during that time that would be taking extra juice.