Hello everyone,

I have a homebulit system and recently, I have been having some problems.  The
system is an AMD K6 200 MHz, with an Abit Ax5 Mobo, 32 mb of SDRAM, a WD
Caviar 5.1 GB hdd, a Diamond 4mb v330 video card, a Panasonic Big 5 10X CD rom
and a SB AWE 64 GOLD.  The first problem I encountered was the hard drive
making a buzzing noise.  Admittedly, this only happened after I had put up
Christmas lights not realizing that my computer and lazer printer were all on
the same circuit.  One night when I turned on the PC it blew the circuit
breaker (printer was on the same surge protecter so everthing turns on at the
same time - a mistake I know now).  I reset the breaker, unplugged the printer
and turned the PC back on, but I did notice a strange surging sound.  Then,
off and on surging and sometime a buzzing.  I wasn't really sure where it was
coming from - the hdd, the CD rom or Other.  About a year later, the computer
wouldn't turn on.  Apparently. the hard drive shorted out because when I tried
the hdd on my son's computer, it wouldn't turn on either.  I replaced the hdd
with another WD 5.1, and the computer ran fine.  I figured that the hdd must
have been the problem.  A few times, the new hdd was making that same noise,
but I didn't notice the surging so I figured that was just a WD drive noise.
A couple of months later, when I went on a trip to Minnesota, my son called
and said the computer had turned off, and when he went to turn it back on, the
power supply shot out flames.    When we put in a new power supply, it still
didn't work.  Is there any way to test if a motherboard is bad?  What about a
CPU?  I know that my video card is good because my son put it in his computer
(he has a PII) and it works fine.  I'm not real electronically savvy (as I'm
sure you have already determined!), but any advice is appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Wendy Brown

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