Problem Computer

Amp34 · 12 Feb 2008 at 00:34

This computer is a few years old, just a standard purple shirt PC and it's starting to play up, from what I can gather from my dad (I'm at the other side of the country) it won't 'boot' into windows. It gets to the startup screen and then once loaded goes to a blank screen and the the monitor goes into powersave (to me a graphics driver issue). He then has tried to boot in safe mode and used the recovery CD, same problem happens, it just stops working, so maybe it's not a graphics driver issue after all. He also says it will randomly restart when it is booting up too.

Any ideas what it could be? To me at first it sounded like a GFX driver issue, but now it sounds like maybe a hardware issue, but what I have no clue, I suppose it could be anything.

Sorry for the frazzled post, my brain is starting to shut down, and it's not helping matters that it's second hand information..

Any help would be appreciated though.

DavidB · 12 Feb 2008 at 00:41

Could be PSU failing, mb RAM failing.....could just need a good clean!
Hard to say really, do you have a specification of it ? Could maybe point out weak links.

nathbooth · 12 Feb 2008 at 00:44

I would say is most likely ram, thats ussually the first thing to check. Ussually if its consistent at crashign on boot at a similar time scale it is most likely ram. psu or psu would be more inconsistant ussually. Pitty your the other side of the country as a quick run of memcheck would tell you straight away if its that.

Amp34 · 12 Feb 2008 at 00:50

DavidB said:
Could be PSU failing, mb RAM failing.....could just need a good clean!
Hard to say really, do you have a specification of it ? Could maybe point out weak links.

That's what I was thinking, it could be practically anything...

Clenliness wise, I did clean it a few months ago so I doubt it's that, having said that it always did seem to run rather hot so maybe it's finally given up.

nathbooth I do have some spare RAM at home actually so I may see if I can get my dad to change it, it'll be simpler than getting him to run memtest at least, and do a similar job.

Specs wise it's an Athlon XP 3000+ with a proprietry MB and 512MB of ram, a Geforce 5200 and an 80GB seagate HDD. That's all I can remember off hand.