PC Gamers Show Me Your PC Smarts

I've been having problems with my pc and I would like to see if you guys could give me options of what is wrong. I was playing FEAR Combat and all of a sudden It shut off. After I tried to turn it back on and it would start up and then shut off. Then I got fast enough to get the screen to system restore and it would start, after a minute it froze on the system restore screen. I took it to the retail store and they said it was either the CPU or themother board and that they would replace them both for 250. I asked my friend and he said it was a power supply...Please Help. By the way my set up is a P4 3.4 and a ATI 850, and 1 gig of ram.

Can you bring it up in safe mode?

Press F8 when the system is booting and select safe mode, if you can get into windows in safe mode without it crashing it may not be a hardware problem.

Well, the power supply controls the amount of power to your parts inside, allowing only a certain amount of power to go threw so its doesnt blow out the important components in your PC, but if it was your powersupply your PC wouldnt start up at all, hence the no "power" to your computer.

My guess would be your motherboard also. (according to the guy at the store)

it could be a number of things, and we're not likely to know unless we can look at each part and see what is running correctly.

could a fan is out

could be a short on the motherboard

could be a power supply problem

could be a disc drive problem even.

Really you could have about 25 different things wrong with your computer.

but if it was your powersupply your PC wouldnt start up at all, hence the no "power" to your computer.

SonKev

this isn't necessarily true, you can have a broken power supply and still be able to boot to a point, or boot then have your system crash quickly, all sorts of whacky stuff can happen so these symptoms alone can't diagnose it as psu vs. mobo vs. whatever

Well, the power supply controls the amount of power to your parts inside, allowing only a certain amount of power to go threw so its doesnt blow out the important components in your PC, but if it was your powersupply your PC wouldnt start up at all, hence the no "power" to your computer.

My guess would be your motherboard also. (according to the guy at the store)

SonKev

That's not true, my games used to crash all the time, would have to hard reboot. Would only happen with 3D games, assumed it was my card. When that didn't solve the issue, I removed the 20 pin connector and found that it was brown. So much for my $80 Thermaltake quality power supply.

1. check your case, clean all the components, especially the GPU/CPU fans/heatsinks. if you have not cleaned your computer in 8+ months, you probably have a massive ammount of dust buildup.

2. If #1 fails to fix the solution, the most likely problems are : PSU failing at a certain load rate, Motherboard/CPU failing, or GPU failing. Since you describe the issue as a system crash , i would state that its probably the PSU or motherboard. The easiest way to check,is to either borrow a PSU from another computer, or check with a Voltmeter for PSU. If that looks good,then pull all your memory/components and clean then entire computer,and reseat everything.

Given the age of the system, i would just look at replacing the MB/GPU/CPU anyway to be honest.