Hi,

I'm having a very interesting problem at the moment, and I have spent hours looking through forums and websites for answers.

I'm having a couple of issues which may or may not be related.

It all started a few weeks ago. My computer started running very slowly and games would take ages to load. I assumed it was a virus or something, so I did all the scans, but no luck. Anyway, it wasn't a huge deal, so I just tried to ignore it. Then, around the same time, the signal to my monitor just cut out - "no signal" appeared on the monitor. I instinctively restarted the PC and everything worked fine for a week or so.

I then moved my PC over to Uni, set it up, and everything was working as it was before - kind of slow but still working. After a couple of hours of surfing the web, I decided to start my work. All of a sudden, the signal to my monitor cut out again. My biggest concern at the time was losing all of my work, since I was using several different programs. (I used alt-tab and ctl-s, hoping that it would save). I then restarted the PC, and still no signal. I started to get a little worried, and I assumed I must have done something to the PC when moving it. So I opened it up, took the gfx card, ram out and put them back in. I checked all the wires, inside the PC and out. I turned the PC back on and I got a signal - relief. I got my work up again, and after 10 minutes, the same thing happened. So, I opened it up again and played around, and after 10 minutes of turning the PC on and off, I finally got a signal again. Then it went out before I got to the login screen. After that, no matter what I did, the screen wouldn't come on, I couldn't see the bios or anything, just "no signal".

So I took the PC back home the next week and tested it out. It turns out that something was wrong with the monitor. I plugged in an old monitor and it worked fine. With the PC still turned on, I attached the cable to the 'broken' monitor... I got a signal and it seemed to work. I restarted the PC and I got "no signal" again. It seems that the 'broken' monitor only worked if the PC was booted up whilst connected to another monitor. The cable could then be attached to the broken 'monitor' and it would work.

Faulty monitor right? So I bought a new one, along with a new case and CPU cooler. So when I rebuilt the PC, I made sure all the connections were tight. Turned the PC on, and everything was as it was. The screen worked, but the Hard drive was still slow. My main focus was now on the HDD. It turns out that the HDD was reading at ony 4MB/s. However, if I left the PC off for a while and turned it back on, the speed would go up to 75MB/s for about 20 minutes. (I tried to defrag it but with 3MB/s read/write speeds, I didn't get very far). My plan was to reinstall windows and if that failed, get a new HDD.

Anyway, it worked fine for 2 days. Then I took the PC back to uni. It worked fine for a couple of hours, like last time... then the monitor went out.

And so here I am, sitting on my laptop, wondering what's going on with my PC.

Is there any chance that a faulty power supply could be causing my problems?

Specs : Evga nforce 680i
Nvidia 8800GTX
2GB corsair dominator RAM
320 GB hitachi HDD
2.4Ghz intel 6600 C2D
Corsair 620 W Power supply

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Best Regards,

Dave

Yes, or a faulty hard drive/memory module/motherboard/video card/overheating issue. So, too many possibilities. Given your description, I'd:

1. Swap the video card if I had a known good one handy.
2. No joy? Isn't video card. Disconnect all the drives and boot to a POST screen or a floppy DOS boot disk, and wait for it to hang.
3. No joy? Isn't drives(s). Swap power supply if I had a known good one handy.
4. No joy? Isn't power supply. Reduce RAM to one stick/minimum, boot back to POST and wait.
5. No joy? Swap RAM to other stick.
6. No joy? Probably isn't RAM as odds of two modules being bad is very low. Motherboard is all that's left.

If you don't have spare components, try #2 first to eliminate the drives followed by #1 with any basic card.

Also, if a monitor is working well enough to display "No signal", it is usually OK. It just isn't getting a signal because the cable, video card, or computer has an issue.