Ok, when I turn my main PC on, it boots normally and everything loads like it should, but after about 15 minutes of use, it locks up for a couple minutes, then, once it starts behaving normally again, I have less than about 10 minutes before it completely dies. I can fire it up again right after that, and the same thing will happen. Even letting it sit overnight doesn't get me any additional time. I've pulled the cover off, blown the dirt out of it, and made sure all the fans are spinning like they're supposed to, so that's not it. Any ideas?
Heatsink's firmly attached, and like I said, all the fans are spinning. Haven't pulled it completely apart, so there might be an issue with the fan in the power supply. Its buried deep in the case and is of an oddball design for some reasons.
How about blowing out all the built-up dustbuniies with compressed air? Have you tried that? Can't hurt... One other potential thing it could be, which I hesitate to state, because it's not good and there ain't much to be done about it, but...your motherboard might be crapping out.
Could just be the power supply itself (PSUs can cause so many different issues), the video card, motherboard or the CPU... Something might have overheated and partially fried, but is still semi-working (fans could still be spinning and you can still overheat). We had a PC recently that would boot up and run for a couple hours or a couple minutes, then just blue screen and shut off. Then upon rebooting it'd say there is no OS present on the disk drive. Most would figure hard drive, however it was the power supply. Put in a new one and it worked like a charm. Just glad it didn't ruin any components. Probably not a very helpful post, but power supplies can be fickle beasts. If you do end up replacing it, don't skimp! Might be hard to diagnose though if you don't have extra parts lying around or a tool to check the PSU.
Yeah, I've blown it out, but I've not completely disassembled it yet. That might help as the power supply is tucked under a bunch of stuff in the case so I might not have been able to get it cleared out enough. I'm not sure what I should do about replacing the power supply, however, I tried hooking up an old one I have around here, but the connectors on parts of the PC don't match what's on the power supply. That could mean its a proprietary design, or they've switched to a new standard, and I've no idea what it's called, so I'm hesitant to order a new one, for fear that it might not work. (I've looked, but not been able to find an OEM replacement.)
Its an Acer Aspire AX3400G-U4802 running 64-bit Win7. The oddball connector is the one that hooks up to the harddrive. Its a long flat PCB, sort of like what you'd have in a USB port, but much bigger.
Looks like it was a bad power supply. I did hook up the one I had laying around to the parts of the PC it had the right connectors for, and left the one in the case hooked up to the harddrive and other parts the "new" one wouldn't fit, and so far, its been on for a couple of hours with no serious problems.
What is odd about the connector to the hard drive? Could it just be a SATA power connector which not all PSUs (well older ones) have? I saw that OEM PSUs for that machine run about $100, but take a look at a slimline PSU from newegg to see if they are at all similar. These tend to work with HP slimlines, but might work for an Acer as well. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817104128 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151090
