My two year old 1.2 GHz AMD box bit the dust last weekend. Left it on for the night and by the morning it had expired. Nothing was happening when pressing the power button and it wasn't anything obvious like a loose power cord.

Was looking for an excuse to get a new one anyway, that old thing was nothing but trouble (new box: MSI KT4V-L, ATA 133/ AMD XP2200/ 512 DDR-PC2700/ WD 1200JB 120 G HD/ 52x burner & G4 MX440 video card - all for $956 Canadian including all those taxes). Oops, I digress.

My question is, if it were the motherboard would the machine still power up? I suspect it's the power supply, it was only 250 watts and had installed an extra hard drive and a DVD burner in recent months. Any thoughts?

Anne

Good to see you didn't skimp on the new box. Nice!

It could either be the motherboard or the power supply. Hard to tell unless you swap out the m-board or the supply and see what works and what doesn't.

if it was the motherboard, the machine would still get power, so my guess is the psu

Not necessarily. If it's a bad motherboard, sometimes the psu will detect that and not power up at all.

i also think its the power supply

because it happen to me might need cleaning or be a short in it somewhere or something

Hi,

It sounds like a psu problem to me. I had a similar problem some years ago, everything was working fine and then it died without warning. As you stated, a 250W psu is questionable for a 1GHz+ AMD system. I even had problems with a 300W psu in one AMD system I recently built.

Tomboy