Help! PC won't boot

[Russ Wolfe]

I recently built my fourth PC. For three weeks, it ran beautifully.
Suddenly, occassionally, it will not boot. When it gets into this
state, absolutely nothing happens... No beeps... No harddrive
activity... No fans come on... Nothing. The rest of the time,
everything works beautifully... No suspicious behavior at all.

I'm assuming I have issues with either the power supply, the
motherboard, or the switch. I think that I've eliminated the switch,
as once, when the machine got into this "bad" state, I removed the
wires from the switch to the MB and shorted the pins on the MB with a
screwdriver. Nothing happened.

Twice I have managed to "fix it" by turning the power supply off and
unplugging it from the 120V Power Strip for 15 or so minutes... These
two times, when I plugged the PS back in, the machine booted with no
issues. (Or perhaps it is only my perception that this "fixed" the
problem. )

I'm ready to start swapping motherboards and power supplies, but
thought I'd appeal here first for less radical ideas.

My Setup is...

Gigabyte 7VT600 1394 Motherboard
AMD 2800+ Barton (333 MHz FSB)
Gigabyte NVidia GeForce 5600XT Video Card
512 MB Kingston DDR400
Seagate 120GB SATA drive
Antec True380 Power Supply
Windows XP Professional (with all critical patches applied)

Any help ideas would be appreciated,

Russ Wolfe

 

[Larry Gagnon]

On 20 Mar 2004 10:31:29 -0800

I recently built my fourth PC. For three weeks, it ran beautifully.
Suddenly, occassionally, it will not boot. When it gets into this
state, absolutely nothing happens... No beeps... No harddrive
activity... No fans come on... Nothing. The rest of the time,
everything works beautifully... No suspicious behavior at all.

I'm assuming I have issues with either the power supply...

Russ : I'd bet you're right. Power supply.

Larry Gagnon, A+ certified tech.