System Boots then shuts down blinking power light---help

[Dend78]

ok its a custom built system

MSI K8TNeo MOBO
AMD 64 bit 3200
1gb (2x512) PC3200 Corsair XMS
MSI 5600 Nvidia graphics card
Maddog sound card (i think i cant remember for sure)
ASUS 500w Power supply (fairly new)
Windows XP sp2

Ok it all started like this, a few months back my power supply popped tripping the breaker in the house, and giving off a nice burnt smell in the room. I got the new power supply installed and all seemed to be ok. After a few months we started noticing a lot of blue screen errors, IRQL_Not_Less_Or_Equal, Bad_Pool_Caller, Paged_Error_In_Non_paged_area. They started out slow and have increased to several times a day.

So i was finally fed up last night and i decided to open the box and see what i can see. First thing i did was get the air duster out and blow the 10 tons of dust around, needless to say i needed more air to get it completely clean. I took out each stick of ram and blew the dust out and off really well around the ram, then the video card (these two things being what i believe to be causing the Blue screen errors). I put everything back took the box back in plugged it all back in powered it up it started to boot up then stopped and gave me a flashing power light. So i open it back up and take out one stick of ram, and move the other one to slot 1, plug it all back in power it up boots up fine. then i get an error about winlogon.exe could not read memory blah blah blah (a smart person would have written this error message down, thats not me). I click ok and try to login but its unresponsive so i hit the reset, it boots up fine with no errors. I click the user icon to login and just as it starts to log in i get the abrubt shutdown with the ever blinking power light. Here in my thinking is where i say its time to try the other stick of Ram. I power it down and swap out the modules, power it up and it boots up super fast, and it wants me to start in safe mode. This all works fine and i dont see anything that catches my eye. I restart it with another perfect boot, login it completely logs in, goes through all of the start up stuff and appears to be working like a champ, i try to start a registry clean program and boom abrubt stop with the power light blinking after it had been running for a few minutes. I power it down and the power it back up it boots up i log in and before it can finish the startup programs it stops again. I try again 3rd times the charm....wrong answer.... it doesnt even boot to the windows login screen and stops again.

so here i am can anyone tell me what they believe is going on with this beast?

thanx in advance

[Capt_Kirk]

The next I would try is putting the ram back in and taking the video card and any other pci cards out. If that doesn't work unplug the HDD and cdroms. If that doesn't work (you should be down to nothing but the cpu and ram plugged into the mobo) then you know you need your motherboard replaced

[Dend78]

cool, ill be doing that this evening, here is my next question once i unplug all of this stuff, lets say it keeps on running with no issues. should i
start replugging things in one at a time until it starts acting up again?

my main concerns at this point is to

A. get my pics of the kids and a few other files over to my stand alone HD (which i know this is where they should be but here again things a smart person would do :p)

[Capt_Kirk]

yeah add the componets in one at a time until you find the one that fails. On the HDD question there are several things you can try. Get the EXACT motherboard and EXACT CPU you currently have. The reason is that Windows XP will force you to reload if you change those componets (It's an anti-piracy thing from what I understand, you cannot clone HDD and then put them in another PC this way). This way it should come right up no problems. You might try ebay if your mobo and stuff is older and no longer sold. Second thing you can try, take that HDD out and put it in another computer. Just make sure you boot to the regular operating system and not to the HDD you put in there. Then just browse to the files and copy them to that other computer. Third thing, if you can't get a matching mobo you'll have to reload windows. When it come up don't format the drive, just repair the installation. Thoeretically that should work.

[Dend78]

awsome thanx a ton man, thats just enough to make me dangerous :D

[Dend78]

lil more information

mobo - MSI K8T NEO-FIS2R VIA K8T800 ATX AMD

MSI GeForce 5600 256mb DDR

not the best of the best but when i got it all in 04 it wasnt bad. and it worked well when it wasnt blue screenin me

[Dend78]

well after working on it for quite a while i got it all figured out, and here is what i found.

Blinking power light - caused by the fact that my CPU Fan had somehow came loose and when the tower was stood up on end it would fall away causing the CPU to reach temps of 165*F which the board has a safety trip on it to shut it down when it reaches temps such as that.

so i just took the fan off and reseated it and made sure the screws were tight. it runs around 89* F now :D

Blue Screens like crazy - i took everything out so only ram and board were working, let it run for a while nothing seemed to come of it. Next I plugged in the Video card and the HDD fired it up and it ran for a bit then blue screened. messed around for a while with the HDD unplugged seemed to work fine no issues. hooked the HDD back up went in in safe mode and disabled most everything. restarted it and it ran fine. Enabled some things and a blue screen again. at this point im thinking its my video card but im not doing anything visually intensive on the system. so i power it down to try the ram 1 stick at a time again. I take out the stick in slot 2 power it up and it runs great for 10-12 hours. power it down swap out the sticks, it freezes on the first try at booting. restart it it boots up and boom blue screen. so my diagnosis here bad stick. computer is running fine aside from its a lil laggy since i dont have a full 1GB but oh well that will be taken care of shortly.

thanx again for the help