Hi everyone,
Sorry if something similar has been posted before, I did search but didn't find sth that exactly applied to me.
Anyway, I'd be eternally grateful if sb could help!
Yesterday I had a day off, and I basically spent the whole day on the computer, downloading stuff, on the net, using Dreamweaver, listening to music. I guess in total my computer probably had 13 hours of usage. Anyway, after a quick break for dinner I came back and as my girlfriend was working thought I'd stick on the headphones and playGrand Theft Auto III while she was working. Obviously this sort of game is pretty computer-intensive, especially on the graphics card, which although I only bought it a few months back is pretty old school, an NVIDIA FX5500 AGP card.
When I first started the game it immediately brought up an error message in a non-windows, non-DOS style, which I assumed was within the game engine as it didn't look like anything I'd seen before, and rebooted the computer, just like that. Stupidly (yes, very stupidly) thinking nothing was amiss, I allowed the computer to reboot and restarted the game, whereupon it worked fine for about 20 minutes. Then the bloody thing just switched itself off! Thinking "fair enough, I imagine the poor thing's just really overheated and shut itself off" I thought nothing of it, and given that I had a 5 o'clock start today went to bed.
So I came home today and attempted to switch the computer on. Nothing. I flicked the on/off switch at the back, left it a few seconds, flicked it back to "on" and tried again. Still nothing. I did the same, this time removing and re-inserting the power cable. Nope, nothing. So I unplugged everything, unscrewed the old girl and had a look inside. As far as I could tell everything was in order - no smell of death, no capacitors blown, it would seem. So I plugged in the cable and tried again, but all I got was a clicking sound and a tiny movement from the CPU fan. On a whim, I took out the graphics card and the modem, hoping that might have some effect (see why I named myself novice?
). Still the same problem. So I unscrewed the power supply unit to see if I could see anything inside. Obviously I didn't open it up, that would be dangerous as *censored*, but from what I could tell nothing seemed amiss, not that I could see a whole lot. Same result again when I re-connected everything.
Any suggestions? Would the power supply be a likely 'first thing to go' in this situation (ie what I suspect is a majorly overburdened or overheated computer)? Are there any ways of checking? Are there any other possibilities?
If it helps, I've got a P4 3MHz PC with 1.5GB RAM, a pretty cruddy ASRock motherboard and a few other cards like a modem and a WLAN card.
Thanks a lot for your help, hope I don't sound like too much of a moron!
Phil
