Weird Problem defying all science and reason, and perhaps even magic

[Mikealot]

Ok, so when I do a cold boot, say, in the morning, after the computer's been off all night, everythign is fine until the welcome screen... in fact i never even see the windows welcome screen, everyhting goes black, completely unresponsive, and the monitor goes to sleep. The odd thing is this only happens when the computer is cold. In the morning, I usually have to reboot once or twice before it actually boots to windows, and then it's fine. For lack of a better explaination, it seems the computer needs to "warm up," which makes little or no sense. Any ideas?

BTW...
Atholon XP 2500+ overclocked to 2.00 ghz
A7N8X DX Mobo, v 2.00
ATI 9700 All-in-wonder Pro

BTWW...
Linux used to boot fine the first time... before I had to delete it to do some partitioning... it's going back on soon...

 

[mechBgon]

What power supply? Tried any others? Does it do it if you revert to your stock clockspeed? Is the computer emitting any smoke or molten metal?

 

[WW]

so is the hard drive spinning up on that cold boot? making any squealing sounds? (the hard drive, not you)

do you have more than one hard drive? or more than one ide device on that cable? if so, make sure you have them jumped as master and slave (cable select can be flakey sometimes).

otherwise, I'd worry that the hard drive is on the way out....backup backup backup...

 

[Mikealot]

hard drive does spin, no, only one harddrive, no squealing really, and it's the only thing on that cable... the hard drive is only a few months old, it had better not be going... I feel as though it may be the video card, because sometimes when it does finally boot, the VPU fails and the video gets all messed up and windows goes into software rendering mode... i will try changing my clock settings back tonight and booting it tomorrow morning to see what happens.

 

[lucky9]

yeah, smoke and molten metal is a dead giveaway.:beer:

 

[lucky9]

run a diagnostic prog on the memory, disk, video