Ok, recently my power supply unit (PSU) blew up, and hence my pc stopped working immidiately. After I changed it with a 450 watt PSU (the older one was of 300W), i'm unable to restart my pc! If I have to restart (from windows, or simply by the reset switch), I have to turn the main power switch off, wait for about 5 minutes, and then turn it on. If I turn it on anywhere before that and either it hangs on the Intel logo (or after displaying the total RAM if I've turned off the display of the intel logo), or simply on a blank screen, where nothing appears (the monitor's LED flashes during this period, indicating that there is video signal, but it's not active). I replaced the PSU again with a 330W one, and again the same damn problem! Does anybody (and I mean anybody) know about this? It's really pissing me off
Hopefully the PSU didn't take the motherboard with it. Try resetting the BIOS...unplug the PSU, remove the battery and if the motherboard's manual states, you might also have to short the CMOS jumper. Most of the time just removing the battery for about 30 seconds does the trick. Try leaving it out for about a minute or so.
This is going to be very difficult in diagnosing the issue. I wouldn't want to jump to any conclusions and have you spend money on my opinions..but the first thing you may want to do, is have the motherboard tested. If it needs replacing, the exact same model will keep you from having to reinstall anything.
Thanks. I'll get it tested. Although, I'd like to know, what exactly went wrong...I mean, my older PSUs have failed too (this is the 4th one), but those motherboards were working fine after the incident...so why only this one, that too with one of my best boards?
If you're losing power supplies, your best investment at this time would be to get a really good surge protector. Get a decent name brand product...not a cheap one. One with a battery backup would be a good idea as well.
it may not be yor mainboard you may need the same type of power cell because certain video card chipsets require a total of 200 watts free expecially on ati and nvidia chipsets
I don't think that's the problem here, as I don't have a separate video card, I just use the 'onboard' one. To add to that, I've been using a 300W PSU for my entire life, and I've never had any such problem.
Great, now there is another problem Sometimes, the computer simply restarts on it's own. But this happens in conjunction with the above problem, so the result being: It turns off and on, on it's own, but after turning off, it's unable to turn itself on again unless I wait for about 5 minutes.
Check your bios beep codes. Look them up and remove things like ram..cpu and any cards. It's what we do in the shop. The beep codes are in hardware and run very basic diagnostics. Sometimes this is caused by badly seated or damaged ram, or a loose cpu... I'm inclined to go with a fuxxored mobo after reading everything above. They aren't indestructable..the newer ones seem less reliable than the old things I run, especially the e-machine type.
I didn't get that... Moreover, I don't hear a single beep on bootup. Any way to test each of them, to find out which one is the culprit?
Considering that you have said you've gone through 4 PSUs, you could almost definitely put it down to hardware damage done by the power. I have surge protection and haven't had any problems at all like an exploding PSU but I did have something similar to you.... What happened in my case is my PSU cooling fan died and I didn't know (careless of me not to monitor fan speed of it in the first place) but the comp was still running. So after a while I started to "smell" my PSU, i could actually smell the heat coming from it so I checked it and noticed fan was dead. After I replaced it with a new PSU, every time I rebooted it'd hang on a black screen and my comp would just "shut off" on its own. I have an ABIT board in this particular machine btw. It got to the point where every time I had to boot the computer, I had to wipe the CMOS memory first and then boot it. This went on for some time but in the end all i had to do was Wipe CMOS chip, boot comp and enter BIOS, when I made new settings I saved them and this never happened to me again. I replaced the battery anyway and things have been running smooth since then. Just out of interest, do you monitor the temperature of your hardware? I guess you could assume that your last PSU might have went due to heat inside the case and maybe a dodgy cooling fan. The fact that you said sometimes you have to wait 5 minutes might give a clue that heat is a problem somewhere, altho I agree with the previous posts that this is probably mobo damage caused when your PSU exploded.
Actually, the PSU didn't really 'explode'. When I said that it 'blew up', I just meant that it stopped working, plain dead. My PC shuts off fine, but it isn't able to power up again immediately. I know that it shuts off properly, because when I used to reboot earlier (when everything was fine), after the shutdown, my CD and DVD-RW drives used to get read (the LEDs used to flash) and the three lights on my standard keyboard used to blink once, all at the same time. This happens now too, so I know that it shuts down fine... I think I can try that. Could you tell me how to do it? How do you do that? If be hardware, you meant the motherboard devices (like the processor), then yes, I used to monitor it's temperature. I used to use 'Intel Active Monitor'. But the temperature used to always cross the threshold. Initially, I was concerned about this, and I asked my dealer about it, and also my brother, who has the same motherboard model. They both said that it's normal, because it happens with all the motherboards of that make and model (Intel D865GBF). That's why I stopped using that program. That had crossed my mind too, but the problem is - where? Even if I used a temperature monitor, I'd never know the 'recommended' temperatures at which the components should run. Plus, there is always that thing of 'it's just normal with that particular motherboard'! EDIT: I forgot to mention that I have lost 3 RAM modules too, due to errors in them. Both the PSUs and the RAM modules were lost in a span of 3½ years. EDIT 2: It's finally over. I got the motherboard exchanged for a new one.
how do you go in and increase the temperature threshold so that the PC or notebook doesnt shut off after running for five minutes? My battery is fully charged but it shuts off after five minutes. Im talking about an HP Pavilion ze4500 running windows xp pro. Thanks in advanced. John
