CD-ROM causing a crash?

[Guest]

My computer's been experiencing loss of power whenever I use a program that
requires the CD-ROM. It doesn't crash right away - I can run the program for
20-30 minutes before the computer loses power. The screen goes black, the
fan disengages, and the whole thing simply shuts down immediately.

The crash seems to be just a loss of power, as the system log doesn't record
any errors and when I press the power button on the computer after a crash,
Windows XP Pro starts up normally. I've tried replacing the external power
cable but it didn't solve the problem. CHKDSK doesn't find any errors on the
drive and it's a relatively new hard drive, about 2 months old. My
antivirus, which is up-to-date, can't find any viruses either.

I'm sure it's a hardware problem, but what part is faulty? Could a power
connector to the CD-ROM cause the entire computer to crash, even?

Thanks for your patience, and I hope someone has an idea of what's wrong.

 

[Rich Barry]

Symptoms that you are describing are usually related to flaky Power Supply.

 

[Sparda]

Symptoms that you are describing are usually related to flaky
Power Supply.


what's wrong.

it’s not nesasery "flaky" as you put it, it’s probably just under
powered for the hardware inuse, as PSU that dont meet the requierments
will hold out for a short time, but then run out of power and turn
it’s self up to avoid damange to hardware (some times if the mother
borad is not suficiantly powered, it can damage it), so for safty it
cuts all power.

EXAMPLE: a 300Watt PSU is not capable of supporting a ATX motherborad
plus 12V connecter, plus 2 CD-ROM drives, 2HD’s and a Radeon 9800,
when the 9800 is processing graphics. if you want to run that, you
would need a 400Watt PSU.