Please Help!!

OK, I recently got a pc from a buddy as a birthday gift and it didnt work when i got it. When i say it didnt work i mean when i plugged everything in and turned on the computer, the moniter just stayed black. When i asked my freind about it he said to take it over and we unpluged everything but the monitor and then turned it on. It worked! I took it home and it worked there for awhile but one moring when i moved the mouse to take it out of power saver mode the same thing happend i turned it off and on i tried what my frieind and I tried but nothing worked. The monitor still stays black when I turn on my computer and i dont know what to do i tried to dust off the motherbord but that didnt work can anyone tell me what to do?

What are the specs of your PC? (Processor, Graphics Card, RAM) and importantly that needs adding, how much Watts are in your Power Supply of the PC?

Although I had your problem once, Power Supply wasn't my problem, I just reset the CMOS/BIOS with the jumper on my motherboard.

Nonetheless, I'm willing to bet it's power supply related. What I suspect is going on here is that the power supply isn't good enough to handle dirty power and the power at his house is probably dirtier than the friend's. I might add that those cheap power supplies that come in basically every prebuilt system and nearly every case are quire terrible. And don't think it's good just because it says 550W or something like that -- that assumes you run 100% battery stable exactly 115V with perfectly stable current and a perfect vaccuum (no air, no EMF, nothing.) In other words, they're lying.

I'd say find a friend or someone you know with a good PSU and borrow it for testing. If it works, you know. If you have a local store (Best Buy perhaps) try to find a quality one and you can take it back if it doesn't help. No harm done. Remember, you need promises of stability, not promises of uber-high power, so look for that on the box. Go with brands like Antec, ThermalTake, etc.

If you can't do this yourself, find a friend who claims he knows hardware. If he knows anything at all, he can handle a PSU.

Maybe the memory, I changed my motherboard yesterday and had 2 sticks of 512 and the mobo did not like one of them.

Anytime I put it there the pc starts and then turns off.

How many sticks of memory does it have, try to take one out and test and then if it happens take out the one thats there and put the one that you took out.

If this ends up being the case, I would get a UPS where the pc is constanly running off of the battery (prevents brown outs or power spikes) not one that "kicks" in after the power goes out.

I really like Enermax Power supplies myself if your replacing your PSU.

You're probably right. A battery should smooth out spikes. Still, if the PSU is close enough that dirty power is causing serious problems I would still tend to say that it really should be upgraded. Unfortunately, companies just don't feel obligated to ensure a quality PSU in most prebuilt systems or cases. As for brands, yes, Enermax is among the top. You might also want to look at a little known brand called XClio. I recently bought one of those and my PSU is so rock stable I noticed that fan speeds don't even budge hardly, which is just scary. That for half the cost of a similar quality PSU from most brands. I do second the idea of adding something to clean up the power if it does turn out it's dirty. Battery backups are a good choice since the double as keeping you from loosing data on power outages. There are also cheaper alternatives such as devices you can plug into the wall and plug the PC into those which will supposedly smooth things out a bit too. A while back I got one of those from radioshack around $40 or so. I didn't see huge differences on my old power supply, but, it wasn't really a terribly cheap PSU and my power isn't very dirty, so I can't say whether it worked or not.


BTW, if you suspect memory, take a look at Memtest86+. It's a free bootable utility which you can put on a floppy or burn to a CD and run to test your memory. Ok, no good if the system won't come on or reboots too soon, but, if you can get it up and running and consistantly see errors for the exact same place, then you'll have confirmed a memory problem. Don't be fooled, inconsistant errors can mean CPU or memory. If you want to test CPU, Prime95 is hard to beat, though it will admitedly test memory just a little (it's almost impossible to test just one without the other.) Prime95 will find CPU errors that nothing else will (for example, if I overclock to 2.6GHz, windows will start up and run along smoothly for hours without a problem, but, prime95 almost instantly tells me something's wrong.)