Bad Power Supply?

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slashfan7964
Hey guys, I've been having some increasingly common issues with our main PC lately.

It's slowly been acting up over the past year. The computer is a 2007 HP Pavillion with Vista Home Premium. Has an AMD Phenom X4 64 bit quad core processor. It's been a very good PC and we have a gotten a lot of use out of it. I have everything also backed up as well.

Anyways, Some of the symptoms I've been having is sometimes a random lockup or total freeze after a while, sometimes it doesn't display a theme correctly etc. If I power the PC off, and reboot it, sometimes it will blue screen, others it will ask if I want to run it in safe mode etc. If it has to be shut down, then it will power on but nothing will appear on the screen and the HDD will show very little activity.

I pulled the plug out of the back and waited for it to bleed the power out of it. Plugged it back in, and it fired up on it's own, saying the BIOS had been reset to defaults settings. It's been fine since (today anyways) with just small theme issue. I thought for a while the HDD was going bad but I'm not sure...

My question is, is the power supply going? I have a few friends into computers and they agreed it sounded like the PSU was on it's way out. It seems like it's not quite getting enough power sometimes and that's causing a lockup.
 
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Simply unplugging the computer shouldn't reset the BIOS and as far as I'm aware, neither would a bad power supply. The first thing I'd do, and thankfully it's cheap, is replace the CMOS battery.

Unplug the tower, open the case and remove the battery (looks a bit like a quarter) to verify the type. It's likely a 2032. Pick up a new one, put it back in and cross your fingers.

While you have the case open, vacuum out all the nooks and crannies, too. ;)
 
When I plugged it back in it started up on it's own and loaded up a black screen with white text that was talking about how the BIOS was now reset to default settings (this was stated at the bottom). It was only there for a minute, and I didn't have enough time to read everything before it shut down and restarted normally.

I clean it out once a month usually with a can of compressed air and a light finger.

I'll let my dad know about it as he will be purchasing all the new hardware. Thanks for your help TB, lets pray that it works.
 
Sounding more and more like the CMOS battery. It has been good to you for 6 years, after all. :lol:
 
TB
Sounding more and more like the CMOS battery. It has been good to you for 6 years, after all. :lol:
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If this was the case, then would it cause a system repair to tell me my hard drive is going bad? My dad told me he ran into that issue the other night along with random "couldn't connect to user profile system" errors.
 
That is the CMOS battery. It will tell you things like that as it does not have enough power to verify your preferences.
 
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Alrighty. How can I convince him it's not the hard drive? He is DEAD SET that it is indeed bad.
 
Tell him to spend the $5 on the battery and if it's not that, then he can spend the $50+ on a new drive.
 
As of right now, it seems to be fine since that reset thing. Only froze once the next day but been fine since. interesting.
 
Slashfan
If this was the case, then would it cause a system repair to tell me my hard drive is going bad? My dad told me he ran into that issue the other night along with random "couldn't connect to user profile system" errors.
Click to expand...


Can not connect to user profile service is a corruption of the user profile settings in the registry
 
Infinital-NG
It's possible, have you tried the acronis drive monitor, or downloaded a hard drive testing utility?
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At the moment I can't, I don't have access to the admin account.
Grayfox
Random corruption

It is easy to fix when it happens.
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Can you show me how to repair it? It only happens sometimes.
 

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