PC almost makes it to safe mode, but then the monitor dies

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I have a Dell Dimension 8100 that started giving me fits a few days ago. No problems whatsoever until one day it would only boot into safe mode--before I could tell it to do that the monitor died. Tried the monitor on another PC and it worked fine. Then I tried another monitor on the Dell, and the same thing happened as with the first monitor, only now the monitor dies before it even loads windows.

I haven't made any system upgrades recently, and it still has most of it's original hardware (I added 1Gig of RAM a year ago).

Any idea what the problem might be, or how I can get the monitor to stay on long enough to try and run a few tests? I'd appreciate any help I can get...

-Tenthmile
 
It could be a few typical things: PSU, these come with a cheap 250W generic PoCrap. The video card. It could also be overheating, try removing the side and putting a table fan on it. To troubleshoot for the PSU, try disconnecting the pwer line to Floppy drive and CD/DVD and any other hardware, but not the HDD (you need this to boot to the OS).
 
It turns out it was actually the hard drive--must have picked up a virus somewhere or maybe some file got corrupted, I'm not sure. I tried putting in a new one and it worked like a charm : )

Thanks for your help,
-Tenthmile
 
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