I just moved into a house (a very old house) and my computer will freeze when trying to boot up windows (at various times during boot up). I have taken it to other places and had it work just fine. One of my room mates runs a similar computer and it runs fine. I have tried plugging in all over the house including where my room mate is plugged in. I can start up my computer in safe mode. This leads me to believe it must be something with the wiring of the house. The electrical in the house does not seam very good (lots of blown breakers) but I still cant figure out why one computer would run while another would not. I might be slow to respond because I don't have a computer!

Its possible, do you know what wattage your power supply is rated at? Your roommates may be a lower end one that consumes less, old outlets can be really bad with providing high wattage devices and computers in particular. I'm leaning this way because you said it works fine in other peoples outlets and that another computer works in the same circuit. You can start in safe mode because it disables the high end hardware (i.e. video card, sound card, etc) and that would technically lower the wattage required to use the machine.

Plug it into a socket in another room or two and try it. Possible you have too low a supply voltage due to bad connections, etc.

I have a 500 w power supply and my room mate isnt home right now so I cant tell you what he has. I have tried the computer in several different areas of the house and got further in some then others. My landlord is gunna have an electrician look at all the wiring so I hope that solves my problem. If I removed some of my ram do you think I could have her up and running? Well I will try that tonight. I have all of the hardware to downgrade my computer but I sure as hell don't want to do that
If anyone else has any ideas please share. Also thanks to those of you who have posted : )
Edit: removing half my ram did nothing.

Get a good surge suppressor. The electricity in your new house may flux quite a bit. Blown breakers is never a good sign. Don't end up with a blown computer. A surge suppressor could fix your problems and protect you as well.

Well I have a couple different surge bars but I have no idea if there any good or not. Is there any easy way to tell or should I just buy a new one?

If they're old, the fuse could be blown in them. Dunno. I bought a fairly nice one that comes with a $300K failure warranty for under $30. I know it seems like a bunch, but I have absolutely no worries now. You can find all kinds on newegg. Get one with a high Joules rating. If you get one from walmart and it doesn't fix your problem, you can always return it for a refund and honestly claim it doesn't work

Surge surpressors will do nothing for low or high AC line conditions. You need a good Line Conditioner... A good UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) automatically conditions the AC lines... I use an APC Smart UPs 1000. It cost $1200 10 years ago. It still works well.

One other note. Surge surpressors can be fried after just 1 surge, and you will never know this. Once fried, it becomes useless for protecting. You might as well plug the computer directly into the wall outlet

I think I'm gunna have an electrician come and see if he can get me some more power to my outlet. Also I would like to add that when my father was renovating his house he hit the main power line to the neighborhood with a machine and his surge bar kinda exploded! his computer was still fine. Also a friend of mine was telling me about a power bar that actually sucks more watts out of the wall. I don't know if he is full of **** or not but if anyone has heard of something like that I would love to know if they exist.

Another thing you might want to check is electric magnetic interference. That would cause the PC to mess up. Bad wiring could cause it if the house electrical are bad.

Assuming that old house has some loose connections and some low voltage problems, the fact that other comps can handle it seems to imply that YOUR comp has psu problems already, ie, it has power/voltage deficiencies.

You need to examine them - try running Everest and looking at voltages.

"Also a friend of mine was telling me about a power bar that actually sucks more watts out of the wall. I don't know if he is full of **** or not but if anyone has heard of something like that I would love to know if they exist"...

This "power bar" is probably a line conditioner. When a conditioner does it's job, you "magically" have more power available

You can get a personal sized UPS for about $40. Check your local office supply store. This will solve all your power problems unless it's a faulty power supply. Some UPS's also have an auto shutdown feature which will shutdown your computer for you if there is a power outage.

Well I know I posted this a long while ago. However I am still having the same problem. Living without a computer was not an option so I was forced to move. Ofcourse the place I moved into has the same problem. My comp still works fine at the computer shop. It still works at other people's houses. I bought a UPS and it did not solve my problem. The people at the computer shop are clueless and don't really seam to want to help. I'm sure the problem is with the power suply but the people at the shop say its not (Not that they looked inside my computer at all). They are the ones who installed it so I think there just assuming nothing is wrong. When I asked them if they looked inside the guy opened my case looked at it and said it looks fine. I guess the tipped me of to him being a ******* seeing as he looked at it for about 5 seconds. Any more help would be much apreciated.

*edit- Perhaps at the computer shop they have a stronger power cord? Do they very at all?

I think we got offtrack with focusing on the power alone. While it certainly could be the power supply still, without actually seeing the computer and messing with it, there's no way to tell for certain. No, today computer and monitor power cords are all the same unless Dell is putting out some strange ones again. You shouldn't have any problems there.

Anyway, this could be any number of problems. You just have to do one thing at a time and see if it fixes it. If I could get it to boot up once, I'd run a defrag on the hard drive. It may have bad sectors. Dunno. But that's an easy thing to do. If that didn't work, I'd open the case and reseat the memory and unplug and replug the power connectors inside on the HD and drives.

Heck, It could be that Windows is corrupted and it's just coincidence that it will only start at other places than your own.

You could always buy a new hard drive, use it as your main drive, install windows on it, and then use your other drive as your backup, not losing anything you have on it that you want to keep. But that's only if you find that your HD is messed up.

Honestly, it doesn't sound like a major problem. It just sounds like an annoying one. Some computer shops just don't take the proper time to do their job. If one doesn't get it done, take it to another shop. Different people do things differently

Good luck!

Yes I think impcfast has got us on the right track again... This "power" issue is a symptom of an impending or ongoing hardware problem, like a corrupted hard drive and operating system. With the start up problem, the hard drive gets corrupted and the OS soon follows

Oh, there is one totally important thing I forgot to mention. Sometimes when I start up my computer the image on my moniter has vertical lines all the way through it. This will continue the whole time. Unfortunatly I dont know how to do all of your suggestions and I will do all the ones I can. They recently did a whole system restore and disk defrag at the computer shop. Hopefully My important fact I left out helps you guys help me. Thank you for your post

Are you using on-board video or a separate video card?

Seperate video card I had installed at the same time as my power suply.

Edit- My reason for thinking it had to do with the power is that it will get further through the startup different places in the house. I have some videos I'm going to try and put up of what it looks like while starting up.

So the power supply and video card were installed after you noticed the startup problems in the house?