Hello there,
Bit of an issue that I've had a hard time pinning down.
I have a eMachines T2615, it's kind of old but has been nothing but trustworthy for years. Specs after a few years of upgrades are:
AMD 2600+
1.5 gig of RAM (Not sure of brand, but all sticks are from eMachines PCs
Nvidia 7600 256mb AGP (added a few weeks ago)
The motherboard, PSU and hardrive are the standard that game with the system. I'm not sure of their brand/specs.
Here's the issue:
For a few days up until finally going kaput his PC would randomly shut off (Note: Don't believe it was overheating. Case was very cool and his system tends to run hot normally). Just, boom dead as if the plug had been pulled. From that point on it was picky, sometimes it would start back up other times it would only start if the power cord was unplugged and plugged back in from the PSU.
Last night the PC lost power three times in about fifteen minutes. It would stay on long enough to load up and get a game started then die again. On the third or fourth time going nothing we did, including unplugging the cord would make it start up again.
I tried a few no-brainer things first. A different power cord, checked the powerstrips, plugged the tower in directly to the wall socket to no avail. Then randomly it decided to power up ... sort of.
PSU fan runs, motherboard light is on, both the processor heatsink fan and the graphics card fans turn. The hard drive doesn't even sound like it's trying to spin up and neither disc drives will open. I left it running like that for a few hours to see if it did it's loss of power bag but it didn't.
We've tried a different hard drive to the same result. Also tried switching out the the band like cord from motherboard to hard drive.(don't know the technical term).
We originally thought it was the PSU, switched that out to a new one of the same wattage and had the same results.
It offers no beeps, and never has (no "boot up complete, everything fine" beep usually or anything of the sort). It also offers no diagnostic lights save the one red power light on the motherboard.
Any help would be appreciated.
