My brother's computer has an odd problem. I guess I'll start at the beginning. The wires to his SMB Bus (I'm not positive that's the right term for it.. a four pin connector on the mobo) got hot and melted.. after that, his computer wouldn't boot. Figured the mobo was toasted. He wanted to upgrade anyway, so we got a new mobo/processor combo. Installed it. Now every once in a while it wont POST. I believe the fans spin up, but the monitor wont initialize (just displays the message saying power is on, check your cable) What's strange to me is that he'll turn off his computer.. come back later and try again, and it'll work fine. What could be causing this? Also, the fan died in his power supply, so we've got a weak 250 watt power supply in there while his is getting replaced. This booting problem happened with both power supplies. Thanks in advance for any suggestions you come up with

Try replacing the PSU with a 450 watt or more PSU. Hope this helps :)

I'll try it, but the 350 watt power supply he had should have been plenty.. he's only got one HD, one CD-ROM.. other than that, nothing out of the ordinary. Any other suggestions?

My friend has Athlon XP 2800+ with 512MB RAM, CDRW, DVDROM, 1 HD, Nforce 2 Mobo and 128MB Geforce 4 MX440 8X AGP. His system ran fine with 250 watts of power supply. Mine Athlon 1.33 o/c to 1.5Ghz with all 5 PCI slots taken by cards, all RAM slots taken, 2 HD, 1CD ROM, 1CDRW and Voodoo 5 5500 PCI required external power source with 4 extra case fans all worked fine under 250watts of power supply. Just make your P/S is good quaility, like Antec, Emermax, Delta... etc.