Power supply problem?

[JncoDragon]

My friend is having a hardware problem with his machine, and I think that it is the power supply. He thought it was a hard drive problem and bought a new drive, but it did not fix the problem. Every so often his monitor will go blank like it is shutting down despite everything still working. Then, if you try to restart it, it will not POST or send a signal to the monitor. If you shut it off and leave it for a moment and restart, it will generally work again until the next time it decides to go out. He has a generic 420W power supply despite the fact that I told him to go with quality rather than quantity of wattage. It has been running fine for the past year and a half, so I think there might have been a power surge that caused a short in the power supply. He has four fans in his machine, two hard drives, and one optical drive. I have tried doing a memory test to see if it might be the RAM, but it went without a problem. Any help with this would be appreciated!

His machine:

Athlon 2500+ Barton
Leadtek K7NCR18D
512MB RAM
Western Digital 80GB SE
Radeon 9800 Pro

~JncoDragon

 

[AluminumStudios]

My inclination would be to say power supply is flaking out a bit or there is a heat problem. I did have a friend who had similar issues until she had her power supply replaced. Just for the heck of it I'd check the CPU's heatsink and fan to make sure the fan is spinning properly and it's not clogged with dust and it's afixed properly ...

 

[TwoBills]

Unplug the psu from the board, jumper the green wire to a black wire, turn on the psu, and the fan should spin up. Stick a meter in the various psu leads and see what the readings are. Should be w/in 5% of the stated specs.

 

[LearnedPadawan]

I'm quite sure tat its the psu. The lesson here is to NEVER buy generic EVER! Most of that 420 wouldn't even be utilized to its full potential.