I hope someone can steer me in the right direction with this problem! I have a Frankenstein computer, it has an AMD Athlon 600 processor (the computer store tells us it "checks out as ok"). I have had two different motherboards (first an FIC SD-11, now an ASUS board, because we thought the FIC was flaky!) We have a new hard drive, we thought the old one was flaky. We have 128 megs of RAM, that's been checked out, the computer store tells us that it is OK, too. We've had two different CD roms, a CD re-writer, which has been in and out and plugged in and unplugged, two different video cards, unplugged the sound card, etc. So as you can see, just about everything in the computer system has been replaced or unplugged from the system at LEAST once.
Still, this problem persists! It was better for a while after we got the new motherboard, but now it is happening again, and I am about to tear my hair out! What happens is this: I will be running a program, or surfing the net, I click onto a menu item (file, open), or click to open a program, or click onto a link in my browser, and suddenly, POOF! The computer stays ON, but the monitor goes black, then a few seconds later, the little green light on the monitor goes to yellow. Turning the monitor off and then on again does nothing, it comes on and the light stays yellow, and the screen is black. But the computer, from what I can tell, is still running. Power is still on, it is humming. But the only way I can get it off is to do a cold crash, hitting the reset or power button.
This has been happening more and more frequently lately. Has anyone else ever had that problem? I can't seem to trace it down to one program that generates the phenomenon, or I'd suspect a software problem. I'm trying to design graphics and websites with this computer, and I'm just about ready to throw the whole thing out the window!!! Could it be the AMD processor after all? The computer store says it checked out, but it's about the ONLY thing that hasn't been replaced, along with the RAM they sold us, which they claim is AOK too! HELP!!! I'm afraid all these cold crashes are going to wreak havoc on my new hard drive!!!!
