sorry if this is double posted, my login expired while writing the last version and this caused some trouble with the posting... on to my problem.

I recently bought a refurbished Gateway desktop (sorry don't know the specs on the mother board etc off the top of my head, Pentium 4 and WinXP is the best I can say for now.) Periodically my monitor goes blank, the speaker stop making any sounds and the keyboard (and presumably mouse) cease to respond to keyboard commands. A couple specifics:
-When the monitor goes blank it acts like it is not recieving a signal, in other words the power light dims to orange.
-Although the keyboard stops responding (no Ctrl-Alt-Del, etc) the indicator lights for num/caps/scroll lock stay on where appropriate
-For all purposes the computer itself does not give any indication (that I can see/hear) something is wrong or even happening. Fans are still running, the hardrive isn't cranking and there are no lights/sounds out of the ordinary.

I'm having trouble discerning any pattern to when this happens... It has occured:
-"before" I boot (I turn the computer on and everything is blank)
-while I'm booting
-any time (30 seconds, 2 hours or 3 weeks) after I've booted
It's happened while I'm running an app and it's occured after the computer has been idle for several hours. In fact the only correlation that I can make is this: the longer it is off, the longer it seems to last when it's back on (pretty subjective, but it seems to hold)

Any thoughts on what's going on? I'm guessing this is a hardware issue because it doesn't match anything I know about software, and I'm relatively ignorant when it comes to hardware. Whatever help you can give is appreciated.

Sam

The first thing i'd do is determine whether or not the Monitor is the issue or the PC. Swap out the monitor for a different one.....then you can start to eliminate hardware issues regarding to the PC....

Its almost definitely a hardware (monitor or PC) issue as the problem, as you say, occurs before the OS (Windows) has even loaded on occasions.

Chump

I'll double check this tonight, but I believe the monitor is not the problem. The monitor was actually purchased with my previous computer, which had no such problems. Plus that (I think) still wouldn't account for the issues with the keyboard and sound. None the less I'll switch in a new monitor tonight to see if it's some interaction between the video card and the monitor.

Thanks,
Sam

PS: In case it's relevant, my video and sound cards are both integrated on the mother board.

it won't hurt to rule it out....makes diagnosing the issue easier then......

fair enough......

While I'm at it, are there any hardware specs that would be usefull? If so where should I look for them?

Well it's official, it's not the monitor. Just switched it out and it did the same thing...what's up next?

The next thing on the list that I'd check would be your graphics card. Its almost definitely the root of the problem however the only real way to eliminate this would be to swap it out for another. Are you able to do this?

It could also be a faulty power supply but I'd be tempted to rule out the GC first followed by the power supply. The only realy way to diagnose a hardware problem is to approach it methodically and elimate each component piece by piece until you find the root of the problem.

hmm...well it's certainly possible for me to do this, although it's a bit more of pain (I don't own another video card, my last one was integrated on the mother board.)

But I have a question. I'll premise this by saying that I don't know exactly how the various input/output devices work with each other and the motherboard, so this may well be the source of my confusion. Here's my sticking point, it seems to me that if the problem was with the monitor/cord/video card then the only thing that would be affected is the display. However when my computer blanks out it's also disabling the keyboard and speakers. If the display was the only problem I would assume that I should still be able to hear sounds (like the welcome/startup sound bite when I boot up) and I would still be able to use keyboard commands that would affect the status of the computer (like Ctrl-Alt-Del, Alt-F4, etc.) Essentially all the I/O devices are acting as if my computer has been turned off.

Mostly I'm curious if it's common/likely/possible for the different devices and cards to affect each other in this sort of way. Again I have to plead ignorance on this, I just don't want to drop $100 on a video card if I can rule it out before-hand.

Thanks,
Sam

ok, I'm back, did you miss me?

After much delay I finally bought a video card to try and switch out for a quick fix. I ran home to install it and quickly notice that the card requires a 250W power supply. Checking my power supply I find two wattages, 45W and 180W, with the explanations covered by part of the case. So I have several questions:

Is the sticker on the p.s. the correct place to be getting the wattage?
If so then it seems I'm 70W short of the requirements for my card, which I would assume is a problem....
Given that, is it possible the power supply has too low of a wattage for my current integrated 64MB video card? I'm not sure how much they change when a computer is refurbished...
Otherwise, any suggestions on where to get a new 250W p.s., preferably a physically small one (I have a compact case and the current p.s. is already covering one of my PCI slots.

Well that's all for now, any help is appreciated.

Sam

The sticker should be a pretty good indication of the power of the supply. You wouldn't expect the general user to measure power and calculate it accordingly. Since you mentioned P4, i doubt its probably the 180W that counts.

Its probably not a good idea to use components that have a higher power rating than the pcu because this will cause the voltage rails to drop if too much current is drawn. This isn't really desirable.

I doubt that the card itself will take that much power, so it should be fine. in fact i've never heard of a graphics card with a power rating. I really doubt that a gc will use 250W of power by itself...

see if you can't find a spare pcu lying around somewhere. They're not too expensive, but we don't want you to go out and by a whole new system now do we

hope that helped