Quote:
The power source could also be the issue but I think you would get an error message for that.
Not necessarily - and in most cases, probably not, unless you have a high-end specialty case designed to monitor power usage.
Anecdotal evidence: When I moved in with my girlfriend, she had a system that she'd been using, and her ex had been upgrading with his old parts while they were married (He liked playing FPS games, she liked puzzle games, so the arrangement worked out for them - one purchase equaled two upgrades). He moved out of the picture, I moved into the picture. Her system goes through several upgrades, including adding another hard drive, replacing the mobo/cpu, and getting a better video card.
So, one day we were having a problem with my system having graphical problems. Since we had functionally the same video cards, just from different manufacturers, we swapped video cards to see if that was the problem, or if it was something else. Her system suddenly refused to boot - wouldn't even get to POST, it's just simply dead. After far too much poking and prodding trying to figure out what's wrong, we finally figured out that the problem is the power supply, which we figured had just finally given up the ghost. We bought her a beefy new power supply, and when I went to take out the old power supply, I finally noticed what the real problem was: She had a
165 watt power supply running a middle-of-the-road Athlon system. It shouldn't have ever run at all, but it did.
And why did swapping virtually-identical video cards make it suddenly die? Mine had a tiny little fan on it, hers didn't have one... the added power drain from the tiny little fan was the proverbial last straw for the overworked PSU.
So, yeah. Power issues are a definite candidate for the culprit here.
Edited, Tue Nov 15 18:41:59 2005 by Nekojin