I know what you mean. HDDs are way too unreliable to trust as a primary backup, and yet they are also way too big to be backed up economically (timewise and DVD-wise).

Obviously, call centres only deal with problems, so you don't get to hear about all the satisfied customers, but from the moment machines started being sold in the stores with 200GB drives there were...

You can't really narrow it down any more than you have!

PSU error light with nothing else connected? So a PSU fault.

And you have extended warranty? You're covered for everything except...

In the UK, it would be repaired within days.

It depends on your retailer's support structure. Often, if retailers have their own technical support they repair under licence in 12 month warranty....

Well, better a 50-day wait than no computer, period!

That's just bad service, of course, and I can't comment on it directly - not knowing the full details.

If we book out an engineer (or...

Ah. Well, under warranty you are quids in.

Unplug everything and let it stand for a few minutes - just the tower with nothing connected.

Plug in the mains and look at that led on the back.
...

The flashing light on the back is surely telling you there's a PSU problem? It is normally on steady, isn't it?

The problem with searching for answers to this sort of problem is that often a lot...

If we came up against this with a customer, we'd have to treat it as a motherboard issue of some sort.

If it was overheating that badly I'd expect there to be problems turning it back on...

There's nothing wrong with IE.

This is the price you pay for downloading beta software and not reading the part which warns you it could crash your system ;)

The same thing happened when SP2...

Well, you could download normaliz.dll and see if replacing it works. You might also need iertutil.dll.

This seems to be quite a common problem when installing IE7.

Can you get into Safe Mode?

If you say to someone who thinks they've broken something "Was it hot" the first thing they'll say is yes, when actually they don't know because they don't know what the normal temperature is.
...

Just to put this into perspective, I've built numerous PCs for myself and others and none of them have ever had problems (yet), and many are older than most bought desktops out there..

It depends...