I'm working on a friend's 6-month old computer. It has an Athlon 64-bit 
dual-core 4200 chip and running XP SP3 with 1 Gb RAM.

It has suddenly stopped booting into Windows. As soon as it is past the 
bios stage, it cuts out as if the power has been cut.

I suspected overheating, so I got into Bios and checked temps. The cpu, 
with only bios loaded, is slowly building up to 75c. At that point the 
power cuts out---I guess it's set to do so.

My guess therefore is that as soon as XP starts to load, cpu temperature 
may be increasing within a few seconds to the point where power cuts 
out.  Taking the sides off, the cpu is almost too hot to touch.

If I power off, blow air in via a desk fan, and wait several minutes for 
the system to cool, it will remain in bios for several minutes before 
cutting out. If I immediately try to reboot, it will cut out almost 
immediately. So it looks to me like a cpu overheating problem which is 
causing the boot failure.

What could be causing the cpu to overheat so rapidly?  Faulty power supply? 
It's only 6 months old!

Don Penlington


 From the Beach at Surfers Paradise in sunny Queensland.
Computer tutorials, local scenery,  and other things at my website:
http://users.tpg.com.au/deepend/index1.html

                  Visit our website regularly for FAQs,
               articles, how-to's, tech tips and much more
                          http://freepctech.com