G'day, A poser for you learned people out there: My friend has been using his computer happily for the last 5 years with no problems (well the occasional virus) ;however, about ten days ago the computer just shut down. No blue screen, no illegal operations and no frezing. Just like the power had been switched off. It is now exhibiting this behaviour all the time. It will run for a while and then shut down. All attempts to re-boot fail, but will last longer with time. Left for a while, it will boot and run for an hour or so and then fail. He is the sort of person that will not alter or touch anything: he has no idea about anything to do with computers. I have him set up with zonealarm, AVG free, ad-aware, SBSD, spyware blaster and have run CWShredder, hijack this and bazooka through his machine. Apart from some gator, realmedia etc cookies, no real threats have been found. A bit long winded that, but better you have as much to go on as possible. I'm leaning to a bad power supply. Nothing runs hot and the CPU fan works ok. The set up is pretty vintage: 4GB HD, CD-ROM, USB printer and the ever present 3.5 in FD. Some things I'd like to pose to you people is that we noticed the monitor flickering- could this affect the power management? Also, is there any way to check if it is the well known software problem that WIN98 has with power management. Would appreciate any suggestions, regards, Elric

You may be right. Also... May be a new kind of virus Also... May be some new program installed Also... May be A website he went to. Also... May be running out of virtual memory Also... "You said" May be bad cords Mabey those options too. Asus "K8N" Motherboard AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 2.1 ghz Corsair XMS 512 mb ram Audigy 2