Heat Issue - maybe?

Howdy,

Have an HP Pavilion 700 series. At first the owner would start it up - get all types of screen flashes, they'd try to cycle the power, and they couldn't get it turned on again unless they unplugged it and left it unplugged for a couple minutes.

So I tested the power supply and sure enough bad wire. I replace the power supply with a 180 Watt power supply. There is the Cd Rom, DVD, Floppy, 1 harddrive.

It has onboard Lan, video, sound.

And even with the new power supply - same thing - screen flashes like crazy after being up for a few minutes.

I'm thinking heat issue, so I tried pulling one ram chip out at a time to see if that had any effect - none. I swapped harddrives to the same result.

There are no post errors or beeps, all fans work.
happens before the OS gets loaded if the computer has been on long enough.

Have not tried updating bios at all - apparently this just started happening to them not long ago. I did notice when it seems to be cycling though like that - it will freeze the computer on whatever task it is doing - i.e. loading whatever, or formatting the replacement hardrive.

In fact I was just in BIOS when it went nuts on me this time around.


What am I down too - the CPU or motherboard?

Thanks
Stuart

would be a video card issue if the screen is scrambling like that and being onboard video there goes your mobo with it to, the only thing to try i guess is if you have a pci video card which is hard to come by these days.

go on http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/copy_of_7000_Series.html there is one there if you want to buy one to test it

Sounds like it could also be the monitor, try it with a different one and see what happens.

Also 120watt PSU isn't really up to much, not sure if that would cause the problem your having, but its worth thinking about.

thanks

That was 180 watt - couldnt get much larger and still fit inside the case.

But "the1" hit spot on.

Yanked out an old PCI vid card - and wham that was it.