This is a perplexing problem and I'm trying to figure out if power supply could be an issue.
The PC is an ancient P4 dell with XP used by my wife mainly for word processing, email, and Picassa. My wife is attached to this and doesn't want to transition to a newer hardware with a "newfangled" windows 7 (I know!).
The PC was supper reliable up to now, and I used to play BF on it when it was new.
Couple of days ago it froze when my wife used MS Word and she lost 2 hrs worth of editing of a paper.
Yesterday, I did AV and spybot scans that revealed no infections. PC worked fine, but I noticed DVD-RW drive not showing up. I did the MS registry fix for that and restarted.
Well, no mouse or keyboard would worked after restarting that prevented me to log in in windows, even under safemode.
I tied a different mouse and nothing.
I thought I screwed up the registry edit somehow and restored the drive to the most recent image via Ghost.
I restarted, mouse didn't work, but keyboard did and I logged in Windows, but some missing windows disk error showed up and PC froze.
I restarted again and tried a new mouse again.
The new mouse was red LED optical rather than IR and I noticed that there was no light, thus USB port was malfunctioning. Another USB port worked and than stopped shortly.
Then I thought about RAM and ran a MemTest and it passed.
I restarted and plugged in an old non-USB mouse and it worked. Later, USB mouse worked too, even in the "bad" USB port.
Now the PC works with no issues. I never had such weird failures. Is this a sign of PS going south? How do you test those? What else? BTW, the caps look good on the MB.
The PC is an ancient P4 dell with XP used by my wife mainly for word processing, email, and Picassa. My wife is attached to this and doesn't want to transition to a newer hardware with a "newfangled" windows 7 (I know!).
The PC was supper reliable up to now, and I used to play BF on it when it was new.
Couple of days ago it froze when my wife used MS Word and she lost 2 hrs worth of editing of a paper.
Yesterday, I did AV and spybot scans that revealed no infections. PC worked fine, but I noticed DVD-RW drive not showing up. I did the MS registry fix for that and restarted.
Well, no mouse or keyboard would worked after restarting that prevented me to log in in windows, even under safemode.
I tied a different mouse and nothing.
I thought I screwed up the registry edit somehow and restored the drive to the most recent image via Ghost.
I restarted, mouse didn't work, but keyboard did and I logged in Windows, but some missing windows disk error showed up and PC froze.
I restarted again and tried a new mouse again.
The new mouse was red LED optical rather than IR and I noticed that there was no light, thus USB port was malfunctioning. Another USB port worked and than stopped shortly.
Then I thought about RAM and ran a MemTest and it passed.
I restarted and plugged in an old non-USB mouse and it worked. Later, USB mouse worked too, even in the "bad" USB port.
Now the PC works with no issues. I never had such weird failures. Is this a sign of PS going south? How do you test those? What else? BTW, the caps look good on the MB.
