i was happily on my computer when i heard a poping sound and the pc restarted itself and booted to windows again. thinking how strange that was i shut it down and checked all the hardware to see if anything was messed up. well everything looked fine so i powered it up again...or so i thought. nothing turned on at all. no lights no sounds nothing. well i took out the power supply and tested it on another pc and it wouldnt work. then i took that known working power supply from computer 2 and put it in my broken one and still wouldnt boot. it looks like the power supply is dead but could the motherboard be too? this ever happen to anyone? any advice would be welcome. thanks

oh i forgot to mention that the broken power supply is 300 watt and the good one is 200 watt if that makes a difference

It's very common to have a cheap power supply blow & take other components with it. System builders still don't (want to) realise that the PSU is equally as important as any other bit of the system (end of preaching). Anyway, remove all add-on cards except graphics. Leave 1 stick of memory in & try booting. If you get no fan movement or POST beeps then either your CPU or your MOBO are U/S - only thing you can do is try & borrow a CPU to narrow it down further. When you re-build, pay a bit extra for a decent PSU. "I know that I'm mad - I've always been mad..."

yeah its still not working...nothing boots up after i did what you said. i've had this power supply for well over 2 years without a problem, but i guess it finally gave out. it was a pretty cheap one though. whats a good price or brand of power supply?

I have a Coolmax "Taurus". There are other good ones too. I've heard a lot about Thermaltake and I think the other one is Antec. Here is a url to mine: http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=17-159-024&depa=0

I've had a power supply die on me. On an old 486 I had. I had it running all day and all of a sudden (as you said) I heard a popping sound and mine just shut off and I smelled this weird burn smell coming from the pc and it never booted again. Yes the power supply had died and took everything with it. Luckily I had a low end pentium board/video card and power supply I got off of ebay in my closed. So in about 40 minutes pc was up and running again.

yeah. i'll have to check the extent of the damage. i hope nothing else is dead. especaly my hdd. i just bought that. 200 gig. i have a couple of crappy computers laying around, which is what i'm using now. but it cant do what i normally do on my good pc. not even close.