Very weird yet frustrating problem!

Hey guys... Anyways, I just moved and moved my computers as well. Well my backup computer is having some extremelly weird problems. For one, the cd drive opens and closes when you want it to, it even ejects when you right click and press eject on the cd drive in "my computer", But it doesn't read ANY cd's! I have no idea what thats about but the other issue is that my computer is freezing up like crazy and a lot of the time it wont even get into windows but when it does it just freezes up real fast. This just started all the sudden out of know where. Here is what I have to do to make the computer turn on, I have to click the on button but then monitor wont turn on so then I press the reset button then the monitor comes on. I dont know why that is but it is. It freezes even during the bios beginning screens like it does when it ask me if I want to start up in safe mode and what not. It also turns the "memory dumping" blue screen glitch on to. Whats wrong??

Soyo SY-K7ADA Mobo
MSI Geforce 4 Ti 4800SE
1x512mb memory dunno what brand
AMD Athlon 1800xp CPU
A 20 gig hard drive (also dont know what brand)
300w psu
winxp pro

Could be several things... If it's not stable in bios then it's probably memory or PSU problem, or some other major hardware problem... Run memtest to check the memory... also, what brand PSU is it?

If the cd drive works fine in bios, ie if you can boot of it, then it's probably a windows problem... If it doesn't work in bios, it could be a wrong motherboard or jumper setting, but if it's old, most likely it's broken...

After all that, install a fresh copy of XP with all the latest drivers, and all should be well... hopefully. Run a disk checking utility at some point too...

Have you checked all the cables in the pc, to see that nothing has become dislodged slightly? It's a bit of a long shot, but it's worth a try.

well the cd drive doesnt work in bios, I allready tried doing that so I could reformat. I think it might be a motherboard problem because its freezing up and giving me these certain hints. But beyond that, I get a new mobo soon and i'll transfer my old one into this computer. If you guys still have some worthful thoughts on this, please any thing helps.

Thank you guys.

Oh and my PSU in this computer is really generic and old. So theres a chance it could be that.

Well if I were you I'd get a new (and good) PSU, and then try booting it with the minimum hardware possible (ie no hard disks, optical drives or add-in cards) to try to isolate the problem...

Do you think the PSU would affect my CD drive no noticing cd's?

I think it's probably broken... or there's a wrong setting in the bios. Reset the bios, and put in the bare minimum of hardware, boot it up and see what happens... then start adding stuff back in until you find the problem.

This sounds similar to a problem my dad had on his old K7-800Mhz athlon system. In the end it turned out to be leaking capacitors, so an upgrade was required!

Check all your connections and look at the mobo carefully to see if any degradation has occured. You might have damaged a part of the mobo.