Long-term problem that I wish to do away with.

**Roman Clone** · March 19, 2010, 08:56 PM

For as long as I have had this computer, I have remembered that it has had problems with booting up, from occasionally, to the point where every other time I try to boot it up, it doesn't boot up.

The computer turns on, there's no problem there. However, many times it will just be a black screen. (The monitor is on, but nothing is being displayed.) Other times, it will be loading Vista, and it will crash in the middle of it, forcing me to turn it off and back on again. Sometimes when it does load, my mouse won't be on. (I have a Logitech G5, so it isn't your average mouse.) Also, rarely, programs will become responsive although the mouse arrow on the screen will still be movable.

Many would root it to being a power supply problem, but I don't know if I should go there. My thoughts is if it was a PSU problem, the consequences would be much more severe.

My specs are the following:

Intel E8400 CPU 3.0 GHz
XFX GTX 260 Core 216 Edition
Raidmax Quantum RX700
G-Skill DDR2 800 MHz
SB X-fi Extreme Audio
WD Caviar Black 640 GB
MSI P6N 680i Diamond
Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro 7

Any ideas? I have had this happen to me under various operating systems and hard drives, so I hardly can attribute drivers or hard drives to these problems.

**Roman_Man#3** · March 20, 2010, 05:09 PM

A couple times I had similar problems on a laptop with Vista on it. I think it may be Vista not playing well with your hardware, you may want to upgrade to Windows 7, see if that fixes the problem. Other than that it may be a motherboard problem or a power supply, but I think you're probably correct in assuming if it was the power supply, it would be doing worse than that. I suggest upgrading to 7 if you can, see if the BIOS is the most recent for your motherboard, or upgrade the motherboard if a BIOS update doesn't fix it.

**Roman Clone** · March 20, 2010, 09:01 PM

I have used 7 in the past and it made it worse, IIRC. I guess a motherboard update will do, since after a couple of these "mishaps", I get some type of message about the CMOS having to reset itself.

**Freddie** · March 22, 2010, 03:57 AM

I notice Raidmax doesn't send out a lot of it's PSU's out to review which probably means that there not confidant that the 5v and more importantly the 12v rail is staying within the ATX specification of +/- 10% of the voltage which I reckon might be causing you problems. If a PSU can't deliver a stable voltage (which in your case looks like the 12v rail is unstable) then parts will fail, crash and potentially get damaged.