Strange problem

ace123

Strange problem
I have a computer (All New )
P4 intel 1.5g
RDRAM
Agp video

It will run fine for day but once in a while it will just shut down and all is dead.
But if you wait for about 5 to 10 min It will power up ok as if nothing was ever wrong.
Have any of you guys seen this before
What I have done so far
1) disable all power settings in windows and bios
2) flash bios to latest and greatest
3) run PC with new windows install ( no applications )

What I think it may be
1) flaky power supply
2) flaky mother board

Pavlov

Is is producing an error in the event logs? I've seen an AlienWare PC do this in a home envirnoment, took it to the office and let it run all day and it was fine. I determined it was overheating and shutting itself down. The folks at AlienWare said to leave a side panel cover off to help cool the system - I suggested a new motherboard was in order. They eventually agreed since leaving the cover off the case was not the solution If you have space you could try adding another cooling fan inside the box.

ace123

I will try a few things and see what happens. It is so hard because it may take day before I can see if it works.last time it took over a month to do it.

feel free to move this post I posted in wrong forum by mistake.sorry

ace123

I hope I am not speaking too soon .But
I replaced the power supply and all seems to be ok so far.
Teach me to go cheep on a case and power supply: D
This time I got a good 430w p4 atx power supply but had to mod the case to get it to fit for the new supply was bigger and the mounting holes did not line up . The new ps has two fans instead of one like the old cheep 400w ps that came with the case.
So now there are
2 fans on the ps
1 on the CPU
1 on the video
1 sits over the video,net card,modem,and sound card.

Webmaster

Sounds 'cool'

Any change in temperature? (inside case and/or cpu)

RussS

I hope that solves your problem.

I have had a similar problem to deal with and spent many hours trying to solve it before I decided to use my head and test the board.
Heating the underside of the board gently with a hair dryer I then sprayed it with 'Freeze' spray and straight away a hairline crack on the board was noticeable - I had gone over the board looking for a dry joint, but never expected a crack.

ace123

I repair pc boards all the time and also use a heat gun and 'Freeze' spray to ts them.
The worst I found on a new board was a trace short on an inner layer of a four layer board.I was lucky and wasable to repair it by drilling a hole into the pc board.
I still plan to ts the old ps when i have the time but since it was the main family comuter I had to do something fast before they all gang up and hang me

RussS

The question is?

Has your problem been resolved?
I have just sorted a system yesterday that was shutting down with no error message or pattern.
Turned out to be a capacitor that was partially shot - once a certain charge had been achieved & there was nothing running to absorb it would just have a fit and somehow shut down the system. A few mins later it would reboot easily
Luckily I had one of the same value in my box of tricks so it was a quick fix after I had managed to find the problem. Actually thinking about your problem helped me locate it

ace123

My computer is fine now
but I just swap out power supply for now.The old power supply is sitting on my shelf for when I have a little time to pull out the o-scope and check it out.I was thinking too that it mite be a cap problem or maybe a cold solder joint.