Hibernation and/or power problem.

[turner7205]

Well hopefully you folks can help me out here. Ill first start by telling you the problem. I have an emachines desktop thats about 2 years old. Strongest computer I have ever had, never acted up until now. I left my computer on overnight the other night and no problems. I woke up and checked my email and went to school for a few hours. I came back and instead of the green light on the front being it was amber color. I tried to make it come back on but it would not respond to anything I did. So I held the power button in and it turned off. I turned it back on and started going to websites. Within a few minutes it happened again, again nothing I did would bring the computer out of this "sleep" state. I would be working and out of nowhere it would go to the sleep stage and the amber light would come on. So I restarted it and tried to run a virus checker. Well it didn't finish before it shut down again. It made it near the end and no virus found. I figured might as well run a restore with the disks that came with the computer. I managed to save all of the important data I could before it shut down again. I ran the reformat no problems. I let it restart and it started to run the windows set up (setting, time zones, etc etc). I left for about 15 min and came back and it was back to the hibernation state. Note that I never used hibernation before and it was disabled before this all started to happen. So I turned the computer off, checked all of the cables, pulled off the hardware I had installed over the 2 years (nothing recent though). I took a can of compressed air and cleaned all the dust out. Reinstalled everything tightly and turned it back on. Withing a few minutes SAME thing. Fed up yesterday I took it to best buy for them to look at it. He pulled the side cover off and said that on the motherboard the "capacitors" were going bad. Some weird color on them. He said that could be my problem or a bad power supply. I pulled the power supply out in hopes to find a new one cheap. I wont spend money until I get some more opinions. Up till the incidents I had no known viruses, I haven't installed hardware in quite some time, and the computer was running like a dream. I did try and install a program called "Object Dock" but it was working fine for days before the incident. But since I all but cleared the harddrive I'm thinking it really is a hardware problem. The night before the incident we did have some thunder, but I am protected by a surge protector, but who knows. I did change the surge protector to see if that was the problem and it did the same thing. I am running Windows XPsp2. I have installed about 712MB of ram, radeon video card, netgear wireless desktop adapter. Those items have been installed for a looong time though. Any ideas on what the problem could be? Anyways to confirm power supply? They are cheap to replace but money is tight and thankfully I have another computer to use. Please, any suggestions or insight is greatly apprecitated. Thank you for your time!!

[FallowEarth]

Hi turner7205,

I am not as much of a hardware guru as others on this site, but here are a few things you can try.

Since you have another computer, you may be able to exchange the power supply unit with the other machine. This will help you to determine whether the psu is the cause. You may want to try this with the hard drive too.

Have you tried reseating your RAM, or swapping the sticks around?

Does your computer go into hibernation in safe mode?

[cholla]

turner7205;Oddly enough I just replaced some bad capacitors on my motherboard.I have an IBM & the problem it was causing was different. So I can't say if the ones in yours are the problem or if it is the power supply.

Some Capacitors are suppoed to leak when bad mine were just swelled.(Kind of bulged at the top.)

I had to remove the motherboard & unsolder the old ones & solder in 3 new ones.So far mine is working great.So look for swelled or leaking caps.

The bad ones were Chhsi brand but several companies were supposed to have produced bad one because a compound they used was wrong & couldn't take the heat.

If you feel cmfortable removing the mother board & soldering.Then try to find new one that are the same specs. My bad ones were 560

[MUff1N]

Without going into lengthy detail about the problem you've described I'd say it was your Motherboard...Mobo's now are pretty cheap to buy and very easy to get...you can even pick them up at Fry's Electronics...If it's any of your capacitors, you're better off replacing the whole thing. Why? Because once a capacitor fails, the unregulated current goes on and screws up the next thing thats in it's path...and so on and so forth...

The only reason I say it's your Motherboard is because I started having random problems with my computer...never the same thing twice, then one day my computer stopped posting to the bios... Got the new mobo and installed it with 2 new memory sticks and all's good now in the life of MuffiN! 

[cholla]

I will say one thing it might not be the capacitors.If you have a lot of bad capacitors something probably did surge a lot of power through the circuit .The ones I replaced were a known problem for my motherboard.

Capacitors have a certain life span & are intended to wear out.when the begin to wear out the begin to swell .They usually dome the top.They are still partially doing their job like this just not effectivly.So If you only have a few bad ones & want to try it before replacing the motherboard then do it .

Heres a little information on capacitors:

An electrolytic capacitor is a type of capacitor with a larger capacitance per unit volume than other types, making them

valuable in relatively high-current and low-frequency electrical circuits. This is especially the case in power-supply

filters, where they store charge needed to moderate output voltage and current fluctuations, in rectifier output, and

especially in the absence of rechargeable batteries that can provide similar low-frequency current capacity. They are also

widely used as coupling capacitors in circuits where AC should be conducted but DC should not; the large value of the

capacitance allows them to pass very low frequencies without carrying DC.

Electrical behavior of electrolytics

A common modelling circuit for an electrolytic capacitor has the following schematic:

where Rleakage is the leakage resistance, RESR is the equivalent series resistance, LESL the equivalent series inductance

(L being the conventional symbol for inductance).

RESR must be as small as possible since it determines the loss power when the capacitor is used to smooth voltage. Loss

power scales quadratically with the ripple current flowing through and linearly with RESR. Low ESR capacitors are imperative

for high efficiencies in power supplies.

It should be pointed out that this is only a simple model and does not include all the effects associated with real

electrolytic capacitors.

Since the electrolytes evaporate, design life is most often rated in hours at a set temperature. For example, typically as

2000 hours at 105 degrees Celsius (which is the highest working temperature). Design life doubles for each 10 degrees lower,

reaching 15 years at 45 degrees.