Old Gateway K-7 950

My HS buddy came all accross Iowa to have me lookat his box. He told me on the phone that it was shutting down unexpectedly, especially from MS Word.
So he comes here asnd tries to boot up and it takes an hour of starting asnd stopping before we can get to his desktop. He qadmits this seems to be worse than before he hauled it cross country. But asfter a while it did seem to smooth out and run for increasingly long periods of time. We managed to back up important data.
IMHO I felt it might be a virus. I wanted to reinstall xp for him but when we booted from the xp disk it gave us an option of repairing the old instalation which we tried. However the thing keeps shutting down at various times during installation. I've gotten down to18 or 19 mins left, but no better.
This sounds like a hardware problem now doesn't it?
I'm not at a place where I can try a new Power supply, but it sounds like this one might be fried to me any thoughts?
Could a virus still be influencing this computer?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Sandwich

.. This sounds like a hardware problem now doesn't it?..

---

Does to me ! .. prime suspect would be clogged heatsink, or another 'very possible' physical cause might be leaky caps on the m/b. Though it might be anything really on what you've said, ..

If you still suspect a virus try an online scan, often once installed AV stuff is compromised it'll show as 'clean' despite being not.

Right, bad CPU fan or gunked up heatsink could be it.....system runs for a little while, gets too hot, thermal protection kicks in and shuts it down. You may also check the power supply fan. If the insides look pretty clean, and the system doesn't run overly hot, try removing all devices from the system except what's needed to boot the OS. (Leave only CPU, RAM, video) If it still dies, you may just have a bad MB or CPU. If it works with its guts pulled out, put devices back in one at a time and try with each one to see when the problem comes back.

system runs for a little while, gets too hot, thermal protection kicks in and shuts it down.

Except it really isn't doing that. It runs better as it warms up! The reboots become less and less??!!
My buddy infact has just been leaving it on so he doesn't have to go thru the warm up process??

Look at the hardware make sure there are no leaky capacitors or signs of burning.

Also swap out the psu.

Thanks, the capacitors 3 of them were bulging, I think were the problem.
In any case we bought an msi kt6v and 512 corsair mem@400 and an amd 2500 next day air from newegg at less than 260 usd. But surprise surprise.
What does it mean when it says it won't support 3.3 volt agp cards? Does that mean it will not be backward compatible with old 2x agp?

AGP Compatibility should help you out.

Note this quote

Quote:

---

The connectors are keyed so that you can only use compatible equipment

---

Mostly anyway ! ;)

Thanks that was very helpful confus-ed. We bought an ati 9200 at staples. The computer is humming as I type!