System shuts down after about 1 minute 2

[BillyL]

I have a two-year old PC. When I turn it on it seems to be going through the POST procedure (hard drive and floppy drive have activity) but after about one minute it completely shuts off. In addition, there is no video signal. I changed the CMOS battery but that did not help.
Is the PC trashed? Any ideas?

 

[rfeenie]

what operating system are you running ? if 95 or 98 hold down SHIFT at startup so you get to the DOS promt, least that way if your machine still switches off then you can guarantee hardware issue. better still disconnect the floppy and dard drives altogether if you can get inside the PC. try it with just the video card in ? if it still bombs out then i would say PSU,CPU,RAM or M board problem

Rob If in doubt get the Ball Pein Hammer out

 

[jakrabit]

i, personally, would check the processor fan, case fan, and power supply fan... on ATX systems, if the processor gets too hot, it will shut down...

make sure the computer is not in a cabinet without venilation... check to make sure there are not obstructions in the vents...

if you are comfortable with opening the case, get some compressed air (2 bucks for a can of it), take the open case outside, and blow it out...

 

[greatwhite]

Can you get it into safe mode? a DOS prompt? if the computer boots to those but just won't get into normal mode I can pretty much garauntee you that your power supply is toast. Basically what is happening in that case is as the system boots into windows it activates more and more devices in the system by loading their drivers one at a time. If it goes into safe mode and keeps running but does not do the same in normal mode then the power supply is either too small for running everything in your system orit no longer is capable of supplying the power that it is rated at. In either case the system would do exactly this, it would power the system off as soon as enough devices had been activated by the drivers that it could no longer supply ample power to the system.

Keep in mind this is all only if you can get to safe mode and/or DOS prompt but not normal mode...

Greatwhite, HP Pavilion Phone Technician