My husband reported the desktop rebooted by itself. Gave him the Safe Mode, etc. options to continue. All options led to another reboot. When I tried it out it sometimes booted back to Windows, but would only stay on for approximately 25 minutes. Now it will not boot at all. One time both the back fan and the heat sink fan came on, but the heat sink fan puttered off. Now only the back fan comes on at power up. I am not versed with all of the workings of computers.
Jeff did not hear anything out of the ordinary when the computer rebooted. No clicking or loud sounds. I'm not sure if the fan was running. I did smell "heat" when I was checking out the computer, and I know the noisy heat sink fan was not working the whole time. I'm not sure what to check out first. I read an article on building a computer in Maximum PC and felt comfortable opening up the box. When I removed the CPU I noticed the center of the board is burned brown (not charred, but a brown rectangle.) All of the wires appear to be attached properly and securely. The fan had dust on it, but didn't appear to be too bad. Every thing else looks fine. The only thing newly attached to the computer was a wireless router. The computer is three years old. It was built using a SOYO K7VME Socket Barebones Kit, Maxtor120 GB Harddrive, Speeze Socket A/370 Copper Core Fan, AMD Sempron 2500+ Socket A CPU, Ultra 512MB PC3200 DDR 400 Mhz.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Suspecting fan, CPU, motherboard. No noise led me to believe my hard drive was fine.
