This morning my PC’s video display suddenly shut down. When I tried to reboot it, it got through the initial boot sequence and died again right after it switched into graphics mode during the Windows startup. As I had similar problems with my previous ATI card, I wasn’t particularly surprised… I turned the PC off and decided to troubleshoot the problem after work.
After I got back, I tried to start the PC again. It actually managed to boot into Windows and display the login screen, but it died immediately afterwards, before I even had a chance to log in. All subsequent attempts to boot failed even sooner. I actually noticed a little bit of a burnt smell, but I couldn’t quite place where it was coming from. Upon opening the case I discovered that one of the case fans was no longer functioning. The CPU fan and the video card fans were running fine, and the hard disks seemed to be spinning up as well, so I blamed the fan. I left the computer for a few minutes, and now it is completely dead. Turning on the PC has no effect whatsoever - no fans start up, the hard disks don’t start up, etc. The only odd thing is that two LEDs on the motherboard are still on.
At this point, I suspect the power supply. It wouldn’t be the first power supply that died on me… The fact that the LEDs are still on is kind of weird, though. Guess I’ll have to dig up my old 300W power supply, which I ditched in favor of this 500W supply fairly recently, when I ran into problems with my previous ATI video card that appeared to be (but turned out not to be) power related. Wish me luck!
At least I still have my laptop and my Xbox. :)