Later!

skinny honkie wrote:

dontfeartheringo wrote:
MAN BATTLESTATIONS!

No manual entry for battlestations

That was funny -

Try it without the immutable flag

You just can't help it, can you?

NERDS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

$10 to the person who figures out that his motherboard took a crap

+10. I forgot about Ogre. Paper towels, please.

It was probably the main power supply.. These are generally very poorly regulated. The problem is that if the power supply goes bad it can fry other components too, so even if you replace that you might still need to also replace whatever it fried.
What you really need is a nerd to come over with a bunch of old parts and start swapping things to isolate the bad component.
But I wouldn't leave it unattended without a new power supply. I had a computer actually catch on fire a few months ago. It had problems very similar to yours leading up to that event.

A few years ago I had a computer that was acting similarly. It would spontaneously just cut off without executing a proper shutdown.

I knew the power supply was going bad and knew I had to get it fixed soon, but I just kept putting it off until the day I turned it on and halfway through the boot procedure there was a loud >POP!< All power immediately cut off and a smell of burning copper wafted out of the box.

...oh shit!

When I removed the power supply, I discovered the inside was all caked up with dust and cat fur. It was absolutely disgusting. This computer was about 5 years old and had apparently been serving double-duty as an air cleaner in addition to surfing the Interwebs.

I replaced the power supply and vacuumed out the inside of the box and it booted up just fine, as if nothing was ever wrong. Guess I got lucky that the mobo didn't get fried when the power supply cato'd.

well this one, if I plug it in it starts up by itself and won't turn off except there's nothing on the screen it's like the monitor is asleep

Starts up by itself?

Give me a call around say, 7 or 8 and maybe I can drop by and have a look at it.