Something bad's going on with my PC ... don't know what

[brothercake]

But here are the symptoms, things which happen occassionally, like a couple of times a day, sometimes together, but usually not. This is on a PC running XP Home

- a brief "squeak" comes from the computer, like something has rubbed against something else which is spinning rapidly (the HD rubbing against its casing, perhaps? this is the most common)

- the GUI reverts back to XP theme, where I had it set to Windows Classic (this is also common)

- there's a momentary loss of power and the PC restarts (this has only happened about 3 times)

These symptoms are getting gradually more frequent I reckon, over the last month or so, from once every few days to a couple of times a day. What's changed in the that time is that I generally leave it on all the time now, where I used to turn it off every night.

What might also be relevant is that my floppy drive has no power - I disconnected it because it's foobarred, but I haven't got round to uninstalling it and remove its other connections yet.

Dunno what's going on ... but it's starting to feel bad ... like that Episode of Voyager where they have a total power loss in the middle of a completely dark void ... except of course that I still have my mac, but that hardly counts as a rescue pod ...

Any ideas WTF?

[WA]

I'm definitely no hardware expert, but one guess would be the PSU (power supply unit). Mine failed on me a few months ago when I smelled it literally burning. Partial failures may result in erratic behavior like you've described...

[brothercake]

Ah .. presumably that can't be repaired - I would need to buy a new one?

[oracleguy]

Yeah, you'd need a new one. They aren't too expensive.

[brothercake]

Cool - thanks both :)

[Caffeine]

Have you double-checked that the power-connectors inside the box is alright ? Also check that the pci-cards and the RAM are properly in place.

Besides from that, and what's been posted above, there could be something goingo on with the motherboard.

I'm no HW-expert either, I have a problem with one of the machines at home, when I turn the power on, the power-indicators lights on for about ½ second, then it all just dies. But im going to take the easy way out; i'm buying a new comp :)

[oracleguy]

Originally posted by phlegmatic
I'm no HW-expert either, I have a problem with one of the machines at home, when I turn the power on, the power-indicators lights on for about ½ second, then it all just dies. But im going to take the easy way out; i'm buying a new comp :)

I had that problem once, I had to replace the motherboard.

[Roy Sinclair]

- a brief "squeak" comes from the computer, like something has rubbed against something else which is spinning rapidly (the HD rubbing against its casing, perhaps? this is the most common)

Wost likely cause for this is a fan with worn bearings. This may take a bit to check since you may have a number of fans in your computer but you will always have one in the power supply, and one on the cpu and those two will be the most critical ones.

- the GUI reverts back to XP theme, where I had it set to Windows Classic (this is also common)

If the system can't recover your user profile as you log on (which may be automatic) it creates a new profile using the default profile as a template. If your profile is being corrupted by the system crashing then I'd guess you've also got your disk formatted using the FAT file system which is HIGHLY not recommended. Converting to NTFS would definitely inprove the reliability of the file system.


- there's a momentary loss of power and the PC restarts (this has only happened about 3 times)

This is probably the power supply problem already mentioned, replacing the power supply may also take care of the noisy fan if that's the one which is failing. If it's the CPU fan this symptom may also be showing since the CPU may turn off if it detect itself as overheating due to a failed fan.

Try spinning the fan by hand and make sure it continues to spin for several seconds (with a good enough start). If the fan doesn't spin very long no matter how hard you start it then it's probably the fan which has the failing bearings.

[brothercake]

Thanks, I'll try those things as well. Sounds like a 20,000 mile service is what it needs :)