Resetting/restarting causes machine to lose power and BIOS settings

[CaptainHayashi]

Heya,

I just got my computer back home from a LAN party and I've found that all of a sudden it's developed a nasty tendency to lose power (and not power on for another second) now and then when I soft or hard-reset it.  Worse, this sometimes wipes the BIOS settings too.

The motherboard is an ASUS P5Q Premium with a Core2 Duo E8500 in it and 4GB of OCZ 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 1066MHz/PC2-8500 RAM.  The fact that it's doing it whilst hard resetting makes me think it's a hardware problem, but for reference I've been running FreeBSD 9 when this occurs.  I can try reproducing the problem on Windows 7 if that helps.  Power supply is a year-or-two-old Antec EarthWatts 750W.  The cooling equipment I'm currently using has been running for a few months with no prior history of overheating, and a quick eyeball of the system temperatures whilst reconfiguring the BIOS after the first attack showed them being normal (~40C for the processor, ~30C for the case).

I think I might have had BIOS memory issues with this motherboard before, but never anything coupled with the power going off and staying off for a short while.

Thanks in advance, and apologies for initial lack of information (it's quarter to 5 am here so I'm going to have to drag myself to bed soon!)

~ Matt

[Geek-9pm]

When you came  home from the LAN party something got loose. Maybe the RAM sticks. Maybe the AGP card.

Or the maybe a cooling device separated from the CPU. Or the GPU. Check to see if the heat sink is fully seated on the CPU.

And check the PSU fan. Even a 750 watt PSU needs the fan running. Don't smirk. A friend took a computer to a shop and they could not see the PSU fan was dead.  You have to really check it.

[Computer_Commando]

Do as Geek suggests, since you moved computer, it is possible something came loose.
Then check CMOS battery, CR-2032, available everywhere.
If battery is good, you may have the dreaded "Bad Capacitor" problem.  http://www.badcaps.net/