PC died

[Shania]

My daughters pc died lastnight, what time, 30 mins prior to raiding. :(

Its been playing up a bit lately, over heating, and shutting itself down. Cannot remember the specs its one of my older pcs.

It just shut down lastnnight, my fiance cleaned the cpu as it was caked in dust, left the sides off, and let it cool even put a desktop pedal fan blowing into the open case, but every time the machine is turnt on, says no signal and then just shuts off.

So booted it up this morning we put another vid card in, too see if that helps, and it boots, was loading windows then shut off. Rebooted it and then says drives, 1,2,3 not detected. Only 1 HDD in that machine, thats connected.

Any thoughts what is wrong with the pc ?

I was hoping it would last until I get my new pc, so my current one, she can have, but doesnt look like it :(

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Overheating could have burned up a cap on the board or melted a solder joint. You can try re-seating the CPU heatsink (must use new thermal paste!) and see if that helps.

[Bollwerk]

Most likely either the processor or motherboard. Either way, chances are you'll need to replace the machine, unless it's still under warranty. Without spare parts, it's really hard to troubleshoot things like this. Letting dust buildup can kill many components through repeated overheating. Heat kills electronics and every day a component is subject to higher than normal operating temperature shortens the lifespan. You may have just finally hit the end of life on one or more parts due to long term overheating.

[coglistings]

check you powersupply, chances are that it is the one that is actually the culprit instead of the rest of your system. power supplies tend to be the first to go before mainboards unless you are overclocking. processors rarely ever die under normal use and your description doesn't fit a bad memory chip. this all assumes that you haven't been playing around with parts inside prior your system failures besides vacuming dust off of air ducts.

makes sense that after it had sat overnight, it ran longer than it did when you were trying to get it back up after a system shutdown.

at this point, I am willing to bet ingame gold its a powersupply issue,

[Shania]

Alright thx for the replies, no over clockinghas been done etc... nothing tampered with.

fiance at work so tim eis limited tonight time he gets home and we raid, so we will use one of the other machines for my daughter for tonight so she can raid + we need her badly lol.

Tomorrow fiance will switch power supplies and see what happens, hoping that it is something minor like that as this stage noway we can afford too replace anything much on the machine nor want too, as my new on eget sbuilt in a few months or less and my main one im currently using goes too my daughter.

So fingers are crossed its the power supply.