Total Breakdown

[ChrisIVX]

Hi,
Last time people on this forum were brilliant with three separate issues I had at the same time, so I have come back to ask for help again if that's okay. (I'm unlucky with PCs.)

Last night I left a game running (Broken Sword - Angel of Death) on the load game screen, then wondered off for a few hours. I think the game has a few memory leak problems, but maybe someone skype-d me etc to cause the crash, but when I came up later, the PC was off.

The PSU had tripped, as has happened before. It wasn't coming back on, for more than a split-second, and so I had to fetch a new one (also happened before). The problem is with the new one installed the monitor will not show anything on the display. The fans are going round, but there is no windows login sound from the speakers. I'm afraid something else is broken.

Does anyone have an idea?


Specs (old PC):
Athlon 3000+
AsRock K7S8XE+
1 GB DDR 2700 Ram (2 sticks)
1 case fan, 1 cpu fan
ATI x850 Pro 256 MB
2 IDE hard drives (one is very new, replaced a dodgy SATA drive)

Power supplies:
Old - Mercury 400W
New - SumVision 450W

Thanks for reading

Edit: Mods feel free to move this to where it might be more relevant.

 

[raybay]

Power supply is the likely problem. Try another to test, then consider a quality replacement with something like Seasonic, PC Power and Cooling, Antec, FSP Group, OCZ, Corsair... or other high quality power supply. AMD and ASROCK tax the cheaply made ones. If bad, You might want to try a quality power supply tester.
Upgrade your memory to 2 GB of the 3 GB maximum, using PC3200 after a memtest86 test That memory will never be less expensive than it is right now
Consider replacing your cpu fan.
What was "dodgy" about the old SATA drive?

 

[ChrisIVX]

Thanks for the reply, Raybay. Confusingly, only two hours after I typed that, I thought I'd test the blue monitor cable instead of the digital one, and the monitor showed the bios. Then I tried the digital one again and it was fine. Everything's plugged in and running just great. I'm still worried about what the problem was though. It might happen again. Is there normally a time delay for these things to fix themselves?



My SATA was dodgy because it kept skipping, making noises and freezing the PC. People here advised me to use the warranty and it came back fine but was back to the old ways again within a month.

Thanks for the upgrade advice too, but I'll be buying a new PC soon, and passing this on to the parents, whose most demanding use for it is probably to open PDF documents. I should really downgrade it, hehe.