Date: 06/29/06 (Computer Geeks)    Keywords: virus, spyware

Relevant parts:
Mustang 350W ATX power supply
Albatron PX915G PRO
Pentium 4 2.66GHz 550FSB Prescott core

I'd list the drives but the computer can't even get that far, so I can't see that it matters.

What happened:
We had a bunch of storms last week, and while I did my best to be careful and unplug things, there were a couple of surprise storms while I was stuck at work. Last Tuesday, the 20th, I was in the middle of working on a spreadsheet when the whole thing shut down and rebooted itself. It was fine for the rest of the day, so I sort of went, "Wow, that was bizarre," and then forgot about it... until Wednesday, when it did it again. It proceeded to get progressively worse, rebooting more often, and the last few times it did reboot, it took three or four tries just to boot the BIOS. Saturday night I tried to turn it on when I got home from work, and it wouldn't boot at all.

What I did:
When it was still just randomly rebooting, I ran Ad Aware and Spyware Blaster repeatedly, thinking that I had some kind of spyware or virus. When it started having difficulty booting anything at all, I decided it had to be a hardware issue, and probably not HD related since it sometimes couldn't do anything before it would have to start over and try again. I wondered aloud to a somewhat-hardware-savvy friend at work about whether the mobo could have gotten fried, and he said that when his own was hit once, it was completely dead, whereas on mine the fans and lights and junk like that all come on. We concluded that it might be the CPU that got fried. Replaced that today... and... nothing. Did some more Googling and forum-reading, and I finally realized that it's probably the power supply, which I had previously stupidly ruled out just because some stuff was running and was, therefore, getting power. I've never had one fail on me and I didn't know that they were capable of partially working. But then I read this:

"When the actual power supply fails, it can exhibit a number of symptoms. You could experience crashes, data corruption, or hardware failure. Another thing that could happen is that when you turn on your PC, the lights and fans come on, but it doesn't boot, because the BIOS cannot verify a sufficient and consistent power flow is established before it continues the Power On Self Test (POST) and the boot process."

which is from http://www.PCNineOneOne.com

I've also read in several places that the power supply is the most common thing to go out after an electrical surge. So at this point I'm convinced that the power supply is bad. Basically I'd just like some other, more informed opinions, because several hours ago I was convinced that the CPU was bad. I'd take the supply somewhere to get tested except that anywhere I can go will probably charge me more than the damn thing is worth, so... Thoughts? Thanks in advance!

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/computergeeks/943217.html