Grateful for any advice or thoughts on a PC problem. Apologies for the long post.
One of our PCs started to fail about couple of weeks ago. At switch on the fans would spin, the power light and HDD light on the front of the case would illuminate and after less than a minute it would shut down, It would then restart which would have the same result, ie into a cycle. As the PC had, for a few months, intermittently BSOD'd with 'Page fault in a non paged area', I decided a rebuild was needed.
I replaced the motherboard, cpu, RAM and hard drive, all bought new in the last couple of weeks. The only bits from the old machine were the PSU, DVD, case and graphics card. I put it together, installed a copy of Windows 7 and for about a week it worked without a problem.
It then started to shut down for no obvious reason. Sometimes this would happen after a hour or so, but over the course of a few days the shut down was happening within about 10-15 seconds of switch on. During the time the PC was working, there was no BSOD and the shut down was not temperature related – monitoring software showed the temperatures to be OK, simply all power would be lost.
As this was a similar problem to that in the old PC I thought the PSU could be the cause, so I replaced it.
With the replacement PSU, when I switch on all the fans (PSU, cpu, front, back and graphics card) spin for about five seconds and then the PC shuts down.
The replacement PSU is an old one (I've had it for a few years but it has not been used) and of lower power(450w) than the original one(750w) but it is a Corsair whereas original is a Win Power (not a name I'd heard of).
I have unplugged the hard drive and the DVD (I also removed the graphics card and plugged the monitor into the motherboard) to see if I could get it to POST, but the result is the same – fans spin for about five seconds then it shuts down. The new components are nowhere near high spec – a dual core 3.2GHz G2130 cpu in a 1155 motherboard with 4 Gig of RAM, so I think 450w would be enough to get it started, at least.
Over the last few days I have tried,
clearing the CMOS,
another new PSU,
each stick of RAM individually, and
removing the motherboard from the case and trying to switch it on.
The result is always the same - fans on for five seconds and then shut down.
One thing I did notice was the fans start to spin immediately I press the switch on the PSU, I do not have to press the on/off switch on the front panel. I wondered if this could be the problem so disconnected all the front panel wires but the result was the same. I then wondered if a PC needs the front panel switches to be connected for it to work.
Grateful for any advice. I'm a bit worried that a problem with the original PSU may have killed the new motherboard/cpu or the new hard drive.
Thanks
Dave


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