Screen goes black on or after welcome screen

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I apologize for not having enuf brain power to note that you are in the UK!
If you look closer you will see its a starting bid price so its an auction. In addition its used. It doesnt say for how long. I happen to be running an Enermax whisper 350 watt ps on my 5 yr old pc. I have a 64 mb geforce vid card, tv tuner, 2 extra usb cards, 4 ide slots used up and i usually run from 2 to 4 usb enclosures with hard drives, so thats a fair amount of goodies and power usage. But i dont go gaming. The enermax has never let me down, runs from 9 am to midnite and more each day.
If you can get the unit, including shipping for whatever $20 to $25 US works out to be in British pounds then you might have a good buy. But being used, its hard to say. I would shy away from it as it appears to be an older unit, maybe even the same as i have.
If you can get a decent used one at a shop near you that might be a better way to go. That way you can judge the wear and tear on it as they usually dont bother to clean them up, lol. This fellow put no info on how much usage this ps has had, that scares me a bit. But if you can get it cheap then maybe its worth it. So give it a low bid you might be the winner, but dont go too high on it!
Give us the websites for a UK site or 2 and we can pick a few new ps's out for you. For your system your needs arent that great, we should be able to pick out a decent unit for a low price for you, although some names we might not even know about, being in the UK. But surely there are other Uk'ers here at techspot that can help out.
 
haha that's ok :grinthumb
i asked the seller of the psu how old it was and how long it's been used for and he said: "The unit was bought 2001 and has been used in 1 of my 2 main pc's. It has had average use (I could not guess at hours). The unit still runs as new ie the fan is still quiet with no evidence of bearing wear."
next time i'm out and about i can have a look in the computer shop and see if they have any old psu's, but i'll keep in mind the makes that you said.
 
See what i mean, thats what i was afraid of, the ps being that old and how much use. At least the guy was honest about it. I kind of felt that he could have been more honest right off the bat by typing that info into the comment section of his ad when he placed the ad. But at least he told you the truth!
On the other hand, good quality power supplies can have a 100,000 hour mtbf (mean time before failure). At, say, as per his description of usage, 5 hrs per day x 365 = 1,780 hrs. Over 10 yrs thats 17,800 hrs.
Therefore the unit should have a few yrs left in it. So, again, if you bid on it and use a bidder to do it for you, set a max and give it a try. I understand that prices for pc items are higher in Britain that in the U.S. In my previous post i said to set a maximum of around $20 to $25 incl postage. I got that figure by going with a shipped price of $60 for that unit and then went with a bit less than half. So you can do the same, find out the cost to you, then go for less than half, say a third.
 
i was just looking on ebat again and found these 2 supplies, if they'd be any good or better than that other one.
first one
second one
because they're both relatively new then i was just thinking about if they'd work with my mobo and stuff, because it's all pretty old now. i'm not exactly sure how old, but probably around 5 years or so.
 
They are nearly identical and would do you fine. They are also, if recall, pretty much the same as the one on your other post, only the first one you showed is used and these other 2 seem new in box, a much better deal. But if you can get the used one real cheap it may be fine for your older system anyway. It really depends on trusting either one of the 3 and the price you pay. I would bid low on the used one and higher on the 2 newer ones.
The only real difference is some have adjustable fan and others dont, cant quite remember, but quite possibly the last 2 have adjustable fan and the first, used one doesnt, if i recall correctly.
Any of them will more than do fine for your rig. And, as stated, i am running the same power supply on my rig.
 
I would go with #2, depending on the bidding, perhaps stay under about 22 pounds. First, I like Aopen power supplies, i trust them.
Second, look at the 18 amp on the 12volt rail and i dont recall a mention of the rails on the other units. Third, its 300 watts and the others are lower.
Another good pick would be the Zalman. The Zalman is the best of the bunch but its also more money.
You could double check the other power supplies rail voltages at the mfgs or even using google you might come up with that info. Just plug the make and model in and see what you get.
 
really really bad

i've had my pc out of my room for a couple of days so we can decorate and yesterday i set it back up again but just with the basics i.e. monitor, mouse, keyboard. it was starting up ok but then i think something fell onto the pc and it crashed, so i restarted it with the reset button and it started as normal and showed the deesktop for a bit, but then it suddenly reset itself. all i thought was that it was going back to its old ways and it didn't like having everything plugged in (it often gets confused by that) but it reset again so i tried booting from my second hard drive, but it brought up a message saying that a file was missing (i think it was fat32.sys) and i had to repair windows, but my cd is in the loft o i tried starting normally again, but then it said that ntfs.sys was missing and windows had to be repaired, so i put the disc in and booted from it and it did the thing where it loads a some files but then said it coldn't find "setupdd.exe" i think it was .exe, i can't completely remember the extension.
so basically i suppose what i'm saying here is that my windows is "broken" and i can't boot form it. i was thinking of putting the drive in my sister's pc (what i'm on now) to see if i could fix it but wasn't really sure where to start.
if anyone can tell me the best thing to do then it'd be great, because i don't really know where to start.

--

can anybody that reads this let me know what they think because i really need my pc up and running again, if it helps then i can make this a new thread.
 
man.. you have really bad luck with that pc aye? lol...

Windows repair should work (when you boot up the cd) or after you've extracted your important data again another wipe and install..

what exactly "crashed"? physical damage, dropping the tower or just a sharp jolt to the case?

When you do get it working stable, go do yourself a favour and make a disk image of your whole pc.. actualy get Ghost or Acronis or something and an external HDD and make backups (of the pc) every two days..... one if needed.
 
yeah it hasn't had the best of luck haha
i've tried running the windows repair off the cd but it says it can't find "setupdd" so it can't carry on. i can't remember what the extension is but i can find out if it's important.
like i said before, i only had the basic stuff plugged in, but i also plugged in some small speakers in, just so i had a bit of sound. because it's just a temporary setup though, one of the speakers fell off the monitor (which was on a chair) and hit the pc, i son't know if it made the hard drive needle skip and it lost it's place, but it stopped responding and it went from there really.
ok then, i'll have to get some sort of other storage but i just don't know when i'll be able to (depends how much money i have left over) because of motorbike insurance and the such.

one thing though, do you think i should copy my important stuff to our other pc's and wipe the disks and do clean installs? it's the only way i can think of to get it going really. i just hope that the drive isn't damaged and needs replacing though, i'm on a tight enough budget as it is!
 
yeh.. on the off-chance that the speaker could've busted the CD/DVD drive, pull out a knoppix cd and have it take a try at booting that up.. that should counter any problems with actual hardware setup problem, and if it reads your HDD than thats a plus (meaning its still somewhat ok)

Check the CD ok then go back to barebones setup without all the extras on and then try reinstalling windows again. A bit of googling led me to believe that it could be a failed component and setup's trying to read the hardware device..
 
i've found a mirror for knoppix and it has a load of files, a few iso's and a load of other stff. should i get them all? cos it'll take a while if the iso's are nearly 700mb...

--

would it be any easier to put my drive in another pc and wipe it and start over? or should i do the knoppix thing to make sure it works ok first?
 
Knoppix is basicaly a OS on a CD, so we can eliminate whether its driver fault on your windows OS or actual hardware fault.. and it can retrieve files for you if you dont wish to pull out that hdd..

Just play with my hunch (after you decide whether to use knoppix or your other pc) on checking the cd and reinstalling windows with just a bare system [mobo, cpu, power, audio/visual, 1 stick of ram] outside the box if needed.
 
i've decided to wipe my main drive, partially because downloading knoppix would take forever on our connection. at the moment though i've managed to get on to my old drive, i've only stuck one stick of ram in just to get it going (i had to take both out to get my other drive out) and it's all going ok, once i've finished copying everything over to the other pc i can try and start up on the main drive again, just to see how it goes, but i'm not expecting it to do much.
 
computer goes black and needs to be restarted

Hopefully this helps someone with this problem..

For months.. at random, my computer would run and then the screen would go black requireing a restart. this happend randomly and sometimes it would happen 10 times in a row after each restart.

some of the time, the computer made an odd screeching noise from the internal speaker.. sometimes not.

Checked everything and replaced nearly everything.. heat.. IRQ's.. graphics card and drivers... nothing worked untill i noticed that the network card would flash at exactly the time the computer screen went down.

turns out my linksys network card was burning up or just heading to the grave. replaced it and never had the issue again.

your network lights should always be on if they have them on your network card while connected. if you experience this same similar problem, take a peek and see if your card lights are still on.. if they are off.. pull the card
and restart.. betcha wont have the problem anymore.. a cheap fix as well!

I was about to replace the motherboard untill i accidentally made this connection.. glad i did.. hope this helps someone else!!!

:)
 
ok thanks, next time anytihng funny starts to happen, i'll check it out.

i've got my pc up and running again, i just put my hard drive back in the other day too see what would happen, and if it didn't work then i was going to wipe it and copy stuff back over from the other pc. fortunately though i haven't had to format and it fixed itself somehow... maybe from being the slave drive it could work itself out or maybe it was the error check i did, eihter way everything seems ok now.

i'll get to work on getting a new psu and keep you updated on anything htat happens. (hopefully as it happens, i kept forgetting to do this :D)

that's about it for now, i'll let you know if anything happens (hopefully not but you never know)
 
possible power supplies

for possible psu's, how do Casecom, Sansun and Hiper sound? i was looking on ebuyer(.co.uk) and they're the 300w ones that they have. i can post links if it would be helpful.
 
Its ok.. we don't get casecom down here in Aus so i don't know much about them but Sansun and Hiper seem to ring a bell from somewhere..

The main thing is to look at the reviews made by customers (for example at the Newegg site where people have bought it before etc) and the information given on its spec sheet/blurb, eg: Efficiency rating, Voltage rails/Amps, protection circuits etc. and see if they meet your needs.

Post links if you want....
 
Casecom one is a generic brand.. i cant remember your specs but i still say stay away from it..

However the other three looks ok, and just lookign from the reviews they got, the Hiper had pretty good reviews and the seasonic sounds ok, although it is a shame that tehy didnt add any technical info, which i dig around and found the seasonic one

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article596-page1.html
http://www.pcalchemy.com/product_info.php/pName/seasonic-s12330-330w-silent-power-supply-atx

which i have to say is pretty decent, and taking the price factor into the eqation as well justified.. although probably not a psu to be using a extremely top end vid card and overclocking rig with..
 
Hi Guys....I'm having the same problems here also on a fic az11 p3 machine.
During a cold boot it gets to the welcome screen (xp sp2) then it restarts
and starts up ok on the 2nd try. I looked in xp event viewer and saw that
there are 2 "acpi errors" (at the same time) which I think maybe causing xp to crash before it can logon at the welcome screen. If "automatically restart"
is checked on the startup and recovery/system failure tab this explains the restart after the crash. Seems that the older motherboards acpi may not be
compatable with xp. The acpi driver can be rolled back to a "standard pc"
configuration but you will have to shut down the pc with the power button.
Try googleing "acpi driver" for more info... A way to test your power supply and other hardware to see if its going bad would be to make 2 partitons on your harddrive and install win98,ME, or 2000 on the 1st partition (c) and xp on the 2nd (d). Then download some free burn-in software and run it on the
o/s thats on the c drive....if all is good then its xp not compatable with the older hardware. Hope this helps!!!
 
i think i should probably make a new thread becaues i'm not having the original problem any more and people keep coming in with their problems, albeit the same.

i'll start a new one when i have problems though because i'm going ok at the moment apart from some slowness, but it's probably not a major problem.

oh and by the way, i've bought an Enermax EG385AX PSU.
 
Black screen problems, please help.

I had recently been having problems with my laptop where a blue screen kept poping up and I wasn't really able to do anything. I fixed it and the laptop was working fine for about 3 weeks, and now It's really messed up this time.

I have an Acer with Vista Home Premium installed on it. I also have read that there is a lot of other people out there having the same problem.

I'm pretty sure when I was getting the blue screen it was because of a bad driver that got installed. I tried to install a program last night and the screen just went black and a blue screen appeared really fast and then it restarted.

It gave me the options of safe mode and starting windows normally, so I picked for it to start normally. The Acer main boot screen came on and then the Vista loading bar appeared. After the loading bar was done the screen goes black as if the computer was shut down and then the screen comes back on(Still black), but with the cursor. You can move the cursor around and after a while the screen saver will come on. I know everything is running fine, but the screen just stays blank.

I can't get into safe mode either. It shows as if I am going to be able to, but then the screen still stays black. I can get into the bios and I can get to the repair section after pressing F8, but it won't let me do a system restore either. I did a memory scan and it says the computer is fine. I'm not exactly sure what's going on with it or how to fix it...can someone please help me?

Thanks.
 
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