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Filed under "I didn't know it could do that!": For the past couple weeks my main PC has been having problems POSTing. Sometimes it'd boot just fine, other times it'd not even init the display or beep and would just sit there after causing the drives to seek a bit.

At first I thought the PSU was going south - I think my 4850 is pushing it to its capacity limits anyway. Then yesterday it POSTed and got at least partway through booting Ubuntu before freezing with the display black but receiving a signal (and staying on for about ten hours this way while I was out), and several attempts at booting after that yielded drive seek but no display or beep, so I thought maybe the motherboard was going out and it was time to think about getting Miss Sandy for my birthday.

Then just on a whim, I started swapping RAM around with a couple old sticks I still had, and it POSTed just fine right away.

I had something similar happen recently as well -- one defective stick in a Kingston dual-channel DDR3 kit. Symptom was that any system with the bad stick in it would spin up the fans, but no beeps and no POST.

In a (sort of) related vein, I recently had another system that wouldn't POST, but in this case the fans wouldn't even spin up; they would twitch slightly when power was applied, but that was the only sign of life. Believe it or not, this one turned out to be a bent pin on an unused motherboard fan header. The fan header was shorting out, and causing the PSU to shut down!

Sigh. The RAM swappage was a fluke - it's still doing it, and a bit worse now.

Guess it's time for a date with Miss Sandy after all.

I just fixed a friends pc with a similar issue. It would shut down when he played intensive games, and he was setting affinity to 1 core to reduce load to fix the problem. Seemed a lot like a psu issue, but I just went in and bumped his ram voltage from 1.8-1.9 and that took care of it.