System Shutting Down After a Few Seconds

[imported_Bunter]

My nephew's system is intermittently shutting down a few seconds after he tries to power it up. It first happened about a week ago, then powered up okay and ran until he shut it down. Sounds like it is happening more frequently. This is happening without any POST errors.

The problem is he is 1800 miles away so I can't get inside the thing to see what is going on. His dad checked the internal connections and blew the dust out of it, but it is still happening.

My initial guess is that his CPU fan may be failing, causing the MB to shut itself down. The system is 3 1/2 years old and I think had the stock AMD fan. The other possibility is the power supply, which is an Antec of some flavor that they upgraded about a year and a half ago (500+ watts, I think).

The system is an Athlon XP 2600 on an Asus A7N8X Deluxe with Corsair memory. Pretty standard, stock stuff.

I told them to keep the case open for now and visually check to see if anything is failing when the system does this, such as the CPU fan or maybe the PS fan. Anyone got any other suggestions?

 

[amdskip]

I would check to see if there are any bad/bulging capacitors and then try swapping the power supply.

 

[imported_Bunter]

Thanks, I'll have his dad take a look at the caps to see if he notices anything. I think they have the system's original PSU laying around and I told him to try and swap that out to see if the problem is resolved.

The timing might be pretty good. I started to put together a new box for him when his network/internet access died a month or so ago. That turned out to be a Windows problem, so the case, PSU and drives are sitting here waiting for a new MB, CPU and graphic card. Looks like the price of AMD CPUs recently went down quite a bit, so that project might get completed.