What is going on?

[jbw]

I've been experiencing problems with my computer over the past few weeks, lots of freezing and crashing etc. I did try to scan for bad sectors on my apps HD but it came up saying it was unable to complete scan? It's been getting worse and worse until Saturday night when it finally gave up on me. I went to turn it off and when I moved the mouse it reset itself? Booted up to windows then when I logged in it crashed? Restarted it to find the monitor went into stand by mode, got the odd beep from the motherboard(can't remember how many I'm afraid) and my cd tray started opening and closing on its own? At this point I'd had enough and turned it off completely. Sunday I turned it back on to find that the screen still goes in to standby mode, there are no beeps at all, none of the HDs spin and the CD drive is completely inactive. The only sign of life is from my internal CD writer which lights up. As you can probably guess it doesn't boot at all. I've talked to a couple of technical support guys where I work who have suggested this could be a dodgy power supply. Unfortunately I'm not the most technical guy in the world and was hoping someone could give me some pointers. My system spec is as follows:

GlobalWin 802 w/ macron 300w psu
Abit VP6
2x PIII 700E
2x Corsair 256mb PC133(I think) cas2
IBM 75GXP 30 gb udma100 (used as apps disk)
IBM 120GXP 80gb udma100 (used as work disk)
ATI FireGL 8800 128mb
56k Modem - nothing special
Creative Soundblaster Live! Player 1024
Teac CD540E 40x cd-rom
Liteon 32X/12X/40X cd-rw

I use this machine for 3d freelance work and have quite a tight deadline coming up. If anyone out there has any idea what it could be, could you please let me know.
Many thanks,
jbw

 

[earthman]

Sounds like you need a larger power supply...that one is kind of small for a dual cpu system. I suggest an Antec Trupower, like a 430w at least. They are better than standard supplies, they don't share outputs for the different voltages which reduces the power you have available with typical supplies.

 

[dethman]

sounds like a ps problem because your components should always power on whether or not your computer actually works. the best way to do diagnostics on a system is work from the ground up. disconnect your peripherals and cards, and boot with only the cpu, memory, and vid card. add cards, then drives until you get your problem. that way you should find whether you're overloading your power, or a certain peripheral is loose or causing a conflict.

also, check your power supply fan, does it spin? mine crapped out once and overheated and blew up the power supply.