Hi guys,
I'm hoping you can help me resolve some problems I've been having with my computer.
I've owned the computer for about a year and a half and it has recently started acting up on me.
Here are the specs:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz
Motherboard: EVGA 122-CK-NF68-A1 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 680i
Memory: 4x OCZ Gold 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1100
Videocard: EVGA 640-P2-N821-AR GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB
Harddisks: 2x Western Digital Caviar SE WD1600JS 160GB 7200 RPM SATA on striped RAID
OS: Win XP Professional Edition
About 4 days ago I went to use it and noticed that the system had frozen up (neither keyboard commands or mouse movement would register) so I restarted and everything worked fine.
The next day it froze while displaying a windows error message balloon out of the taskbar saying something along the lines of "Cannot read from drive C" (which is a striped raid array)
Today the computer shut off on its own. Following attempts to turn it on resulted in it running for 5 minutes before shutting off, then less than 1 minute before shutting off and finally less than a few seconds before shutting off.
I tried unhooking things until I got to the mobo, CPU and a single stick of RAM. Next, I replaced my off brand 600W PSU, with a brand new Antec 650W to see if that would help. After hooking up just the CPU, mobo and RAM I turned on the power and things seemed to work fine so I progressively added my peripherals turning it off after about 30 seconds each time to hook up something else.
Finally with everything hooked up I turned on the computer and it lasted about 10 minutes before going into that series of progressively shorter times it would stay on. It definitely doesn't stay on long enough to get into the BIOS and check anything in there.
That's where I'm at now, and I thought I might look for some advice. A couple of questions I have:
1. Do these PSUs have some sort of safety mechanism to prevent some sort of short in the mobo or other components from affecting the PSU itself? I wonder this because I'd hope to use this PSU to test out the other components one by one.
2. If there is a short in say the mobo, am I endangering the other components by hooking them up and powering up?
3. What would be the most likely culprit for these problems?
4. Would the best option at this point be to continue tampering with it myself or to hand it off to a computer repair shop?
Any advice you guys might have would be great.
Thanks,
-Anand
P.S. I do want to mention that while time isn't a huge issue for me in getting this working, I would like to have this computer up and running without putting too much money into getting it fixed.
I'm hoping you can help me resolve some problems I've been having with my computer.
I've owned the computer for about a year and a half and it has recently started acting up on me.
Here are the specs:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz
Motherboard: EVGA 122-CK-NF68-A1 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 680i
Memory: 4x OCZ Gold 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1100
Videocard: EVGA 640-P2-N821-AR GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB
Harddisks: 2x Western Digital Caviar SE WD1600JS 160GB 7200 RPM SATA on striped RAID
OS: Win XP Professional Edition
About 4 days ago I went to use it and noticed that the system had frozen up (neither keyboard commands or mouse movement would register) so I restarted and everything worked fine.
The next day it froze while displaying a windows error message balloon out of the taskbar saying something along the lines of "Cannot read from drive C" (which is a striped raid array)
Today the computer shut off on its own. Following attempts to turn it on resulted in it running for 5 minutes before shutting off, then less than 1 minute before shutting off and finally less than a few seconds before shutting off.
I tried unhooking things until I got to the mobo, CPU and a single stick of RAM. Next, I replaced my off brand 600W PSU, with a brand new Antec 650W to see if that would help. After hooking up just the CPU, mobo and RAM I turned on the power and things seemed to work fine so I progressively added my peripherals turning it off after about 30 seconds each time to hook up something else.
Finally with everything hooked up I turned on the computer and it lasted about 10 minutes before going into that series of progressively shorter times it would stay on. It definitely doesn't stay on long enough to get into the BIOS and check anything in there.
That's where I'm at now, and I thought I might look for some advice. A couple of questions I have:
1. Do these PSUs have some sort of safety mechanism to prevent some sort of short in the mobo or other components from affecting the PSU itself? I wonder this because I'd hope to use this PSU to test out the other components one by one.
2. If there is a short in say the mobo, am I endangering the other components by hooking them up and powering up?
3. What would be the most likely culprit for these problems?
4. Would the best option at this point be to continue tampering with it myself or to hand it off to a computer repair shop?
Any advice you guys might have would be great.
Thanks,
-Anand
P.S. I do want to mention that while time isn't a huge issue for me in getting this working, I would like to have this computer up and running without putting too much money into getting it fixed.