OT: system shuts off sporadically

[Vaughn Treude]

On Mon, 2006-01-16 at 15:05, tigerflag wrote:
> On Monday 16 January 2006 03:22 pm, Vaughn Treude kindly wrote:
> > Thanks for the ideas, Craig, Miles, Austin, and Cat.  I think the CPU
> > fan is OK, and the CPU temperature was good at least when I first
> > powered it up.  Unless the fan is randomly stalling out, I doubt it's
> > heat related, since the timing is so sporadic.  (Then again, the fact
> > that it sometimes won't come up for a couple of minutes does make it
> > seem heat-related.)  So far it's been up and running for 2 hrs now.  The
> > next time it shuts itself off I'll open it again and look at the caps.
> > I didn't notice any capacitor gook when I had it open earlier but I
> > wasn't looking for that either.  :-)  If all else fails, I'll send it
> > back for warranty service.
> 
> 
> This has me curious. These things can drive you crazy, I know. At some time or 
> another I've experienced almost everything all you geniuses suggested. Let us 
> know what it turns out to be.
> 
> Siri Amrit

Siri,
Since you asked for a progress report, here it is.  Amazingly, the
machine has been up for 48 hours now.  So perhaps the old power supply
was bad.  (The new Antec supply is quieter, and its cabling is such a
clever design, that I'd keep it even if the old supply turned out to be
OK.)  I'm not sure what caused the glitches after I changed the supply. 
It may have been that the BIOS settings were messed up by all those rude
power interruptions - one of the shutoffs occurred while I was editing
the corrupted BIOS settings.  There was one more shutoff a couple of
minutes after that which I can't explain.  It could possibly have been
caused by static electricity, since I had the machine moved out from its
usual place.  Again, thanks to everyone for your helpful suggestions.
Vaughn