Apolyton! I have a seriously bizzare computer problem

[Vesayen]

What happens?

My monitor turns off and as far as I can tell all hard drive activity stops. Initially I thought it was a problem with my monitor or my video card... then I started running an audio file in a continous loop-when the monitor turned off, the music stopped...

I tried a new monitor before I realized that was not the issue, borrowed one, no change.

I tried removing my video card and reinstalling the drivers, no change.

I ran memtest86, a program to test for memory damage... its fine.

I ran scandisc, no problems.

I did my oldest system restore, though it is only a little over a week ago, no problems there.

I ran of course an antivirus/spyware program, nada.

I was PREPARING to reinstall windows and then something really bizzare happened... the computer I am on comes with a system restore disc, a bootdisc. I'm not certain how much it uses the rest of the computer when you use this function though. The crash happened WHILE it was even loading off of that... I'm pretty certain that the bootdisc uses no installed files, so it couldn't be a software issue...

I'm all out of ideas, does anyone have any clue what may be wrong with my computer? Every hardware problem it might be does not seem to be the problem and since it happened off of the bootdisc, I dont see how that could be it either....

The crashes SEEM quasi random... sometimes I think they may only be occuring when I run high rescource demanding programs... and it seems to happen a MAJORITY of the time then, but not exclusivley... it has happened while I was just reading a webpage before.

I have to physically hit the power button and reboot...

Anyone have any ideas?

[LordShiva]

Power supply

[Vesayen]

When this hapens the light on my power button stays on and I THINK I still hear activity inside my PC but i'm not certain... anything specifically to check for, to see if it is the power supply?

[LordShiva]

Borrow a friend's and see.

[solo]

What is the wattage of your power supply?

If your computer was store bought, then you can be pretty sure the wattage was very close to the minimum needed to run what came with it.

Adding things, like say, a better video card, may require more wattage. (It dosn't take much of the total wattage to keep the power light burning brightly!)

If the power supply is adequate, then you might have a mother board problem. You might have inadvertantly damaged it by connecting or disconnecting peripherals (such as your monitor) while the power was on, or it might have been damaged by static electricty somehow.

A loose or unreliable connection from a peripheral to the mother board could be another cause explaining your symptoms.

[The Mad Monk]

Yeah, the power supply was the first thing I thought of, too.

Newegg has some good deals on those.

[Combat Ingrid]

It could be heat related too, especially if you have lots of dust inside

[Vesayen]

Cleaned out my comp THOROUGHLY of all the dust I could... was pretty dusty, it is actually running noticably quieter now, not that it was noisy before.

The last time it "went under" it *SEEMED* to only happen after it had been up and using a high demand program(civ 4) for a while.

I left it running memtest86 for 3 hours... it got through 4 and a half full cycles, no errors found on memory.

So from what has been said... looks like I may be stuck with a motherboard or power supply issue.

The hard drive does not *SEEM* to be active, as all audio stop swhen the monitor goes off and the activity light goes off, but the hard drive itself is still turning... I put my hand on it last time. Does this mean anything useful in narrowing down the problem?