Epox 8RDA+

I have been smoking power supplies about every 3 months. The last time I toasted one, I went to Best Buy and bought a new 400W Antec dual fan power supply. After installing it, my pc would get to the screen where it recognizes the hardware, ram, etc. I could get into the bios but it wouldn't load Windows.

I then took my pc into Best Buy, and one of the service guys said my resistors were toast...as they were swollen and emitting a grey fluid. I then sent my mobo back to Epox for repair/replacement, and received the replacement yesterday.

Last night I put my pc back together, only to have it to the exact same thing it did 3wks ago after I installed the new power supply. It gets to the load screen, then goes to a blank screen with a blinking cursor.

I was thinking maybe that my HD was toast, so I borrowed one from a friend. When I hooked it up absolutely NOTHING happened. I have not messed with the CMOS yet. Any ideas what could be causing the problem(s)?

my pc:

AMD 2600+
Epox 8RDA+ w/Nforce 2
1g of Kingston 166MHz ram
Radeon 9800 pro

(^^;?( It never rains witout pours.)

If service guys said so, it must be so. And the same thing must have occured to the replaced one. It is likely to happen because they must be manufactured in the same factory line. So that they all might hold same defective resistor.

Then what you have to do is self-explanatory.

Definitely check the mobo again to see if the same problem happened again.

If the mobo is good, reset the CMOS (jumper).

If that doesn't fix it, strip it down to just the basics (ram, video card, hard drive) and try to boot. If it works then, add back parts until you run into the problem.

If the base setup doesn't boot, start swapping parts that are known to work. Try booting from a floppy and reformatting.

If everything fails, you're back to looking at the mobo being defective, but apparently in a different way than before.

Allright...thanks for your help fellas. Sounds like I have some troubleshooting ahead of me.

Glad to help. Be sure to post back if you run into specific issues as you go, or if you get beepcodes or something that may help identify the problem.

I swear I hear a beep when I start it up, tho it's very faint. I have brought in 2ppl to verify my sanity, but both have said that they don't hear anything and are probably starting to think that I'm smokin sumpin funny.

well, after a few tests it appears that my HD is toast. I'll get a new one tonight and see if that fixes it.

(^^;(I hope you'll select the cheapest one.)