The other night I was watching Planet of the apes, as you do. Then my PC decides to turn off, so i turn it back on again load everything up again.. and it turns off yet again with no warning at all. So i open it up and give it a good clean and try again, and i notice the power supply is making weird noises and even the slightest touch to the case would power it of prematurely to when in was bound to power off unwantedly anyway. So anyway i tried booting with all the drives and HDD's unplugged, same thing.. so it wasn't any of them and I thought something was up with my power supply so naturally I brought a new one... It's still happening! So it must be something thats not obvious to me on the motherboard I'm guessing... all connections are fine, checked them all. This is a home-made PC with these specs.. - Intel Pentium D 915 (2.80GHz) - 2 X Kingston 1GB DDR2 533MHz/PC2-4200 - MSI P4M900M2-L Socket 775 P4M900 onboard VGA 8 channel audio mATX Motherboard - GECUBE X1950Pro 512MB GDDR3 Dual DVI TVO PCI-E Graphics Card All was working perfectly till about a week ago when the random shutdowns started, then they just kept getting closer and closer together until now when it doesnt even reach the windows loading screen. Any help would be appreciated.
Just to check, What power supply did you buy as a replacement? There are a lot of bad power supplies out there. It could potentially be a short in your motherboard. If you are able, try removing the motherboard and see if it has bowed (i.e. is no longer flat) - this can cause the joints on the PCB to short out on the case underneath.
I think I may send it back, since its no diferent from my other one which seems to have stopped making those noises now... I just booted up with my RAM and processor installed and the same exact problem... so Is there a chance it could be the processor? I could maybe get my hands on an old one just to make sure.
It's possible, it could potentially be an overheat problem, i.e. the CPU heatsink isn't properly attached.
Just to throw in my 2 cents worth, I too agree with sammorris that it could be potentially a heat issue. Also, I had this issue when my memory went bad. It wouldn't hurt to run memtest for a minimum of 7 passes; any errors and one or all of your RAM sticks is/are defective. Do you know of anyone that you could borrow a digital multimeter to test your system? You can get a nice Craftsman digital for $20 and they aren't hard to use.
