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im mostly sure my power supply died around 1:30am this morning was just playin around in GTA IV and the system abruptly shut off lights in case and all, waited a good 10 mins after turning the supply off, to let it cool down and disconnected the cord from the case, the motherboards lights turned on after i flipped it back on and plugged it in; but nothing started up when i pressed the power button, removed all but the board and single hdd and still couldnt get the juice to flow...
just wanted to post and see what other people might think, since i dont have a way to check for any power flow on the connectors for the supply

Try to find someone else with a spare power-supply. Make sure its not the mobo, if it starts up (or even the mobo light turns on) than I would say you got a toasted PSU.

yea, my best chance is to hope i can borrow the supply out of the system i built for my dad bout a year ago, don't know how willingly he'd let me rip the power supply out though >.>

Say you need to dust it out

You say that when you plugged it all back lights came on but when hitting the power button nothing happened. Did the case fans spin up, myabe CPU fan, HDD, or anything like that? Maybe the mobo failed?

When your computer turned itself off abruptly did you hear any pops or the like or smell any burning? If you haven't paid attention to that yet go and have a look now if there are any funny burning smells coming from your PSU as those smells persist on for quite a while after. That might tell you if it fried itself. Otherwise you never know. Possibly if you have a multimeter lying around check the rails (do this ONLY if you know what you are doing as a damaged PSU could be dangerous).

Remove the 24 pin motherboard connector and jumper pin 14 (green) to any black and see if the power supply comes on. Use a paper clip.

no pops or anything it just went completely quiet, to the sound of fans halting to a stop, and yes there was a smell coming out of it, faint, but there was one, i knew at some point eventually the supply was going to fail, its just lame it happened this morning.
it lasted 3 years, 2 of which originally was when i built this system with the 8600gt originally in 2007 and 1 was when i dumped the 8600gt for a 9800gtx+ last year.

well i finally got around to testing my dads antec earthwatts supply on my board, tried with the 4 pin and 24 pin at the same time, the board lit up and nothing, then tried the the 24 pin by itself and nothing.
then i pulled my power supply out and put it onto his system and amazingly i noticed his motherboard doesnt have lights on it.... >.>
so pressed the power and nothing happened there, so now it seems like my motherboard and power supply went down, not sure about the processor but that might have died as well, hopefully not

I had a feeling it could be the PSU or the mobo like i said above.

For the mobo, try resetting the BIOS to see if that brings it back to life. Good luck!

Yea sometimes that will fix the issue, but if the BIOS had gone bad from a power-surge more than likely your PSU died and took the motherboard with it. If it was a better motherboard, most of those have voltage protection to help keep processors + memory from being killed during a surge...but as everything else that isn't even sure-fire.

I had a motherboard die on me about 2 years ago while I had no money and needed a computer badly. I hope your situation is better and it gets fixed soon