PC will not Restart

[Cas]

I have a PC which was customed built so I am not sure of all the specifics of the PC. Anyway, It started not bringing up anything on the screen, just black screen with light blinking. I was not able to get to windows XP Home until I unplugged the PC, held the power on button for 30 sec to drain the capacitors. If I did a restart it would do the same thing. Everytime I turn it on I have to unplug and hold the button then it comes up. I tried running recovery console. It did the recovery until it had to RESTART, then of course I had to do the unplug thing again and it would never pick-up where it left off. I finally decided to re-install Win XP Home. I did that but again it gets to the restart and it won't restart. I did restart by doing the unplug and button thing and allowed it to continue. It did come asking for the Administrators password. which I did not know. Finally that went away for whatever reason. Now I can get it all the way up. I tried updating with Windows update and after it took forever. It wanted a reboot and again I had to do the unplug thing. This time my desktop has no icons. I am not sure what to do at this time. Any help would be appreciated.
Cas in NC

[Cricket]

You have some kind of hardware problem, not software.

We really need to find out the system specs for this computer...at least try and find out the brand of the power supply. Remove the case side and see if you can get the brand of the power supply.

Cricket

[rjfvillarosa]

Whilst you have the side panel off and you are looking for the make of power supply in answer to Crickets question, can you look to see how many sticks of ram are installed?

[Cas]

This is what I have:
Power Supply: ATX Switching Power Supply
Model = DP-430 (430 watts max)
Freq 60/50 hz
Current 7.5/4.5A
Voltage 115/230w

System= AMD Athlon XP 2200+, 1800 mhz
Memory 736MB ram

Hope this helps.

[Cricket]

I would replace the power supply first. Get a good quality one from the list found here. Since you didn't post all the system specs I'm guessing a good quality 350 watt PSU will be enough, unless you have a power hungry video card in there, then get a 450 watt PSU.

Cricket

[Cas]

I thought I would give it one last try before Installing the Power supply...
I upplugged the power and held button 30 sec.
Came up and I started install of windows.
Everytime it did not do the reboot automatically I did the unplug thing and allowed it to come up that way.
It seemed to pick up where it left off everytime.
Anyway after all the reboots this way, I updated windows and office products. Seems to be running ok.
Once in a while I have to do the power cord thing but not near as much as before.
It now appears to reboot ok (most of the time) without my doing the uplugging and holding the button.
I still think I will go and get a power supply today and install it.

[Xyphus]

Power Supply would be my first guess too. I have experienced a similar issue first hand when I upgraded my old nVidia Ti4600 video card to an ATI 9800XT a few years back. It seems that my old 350W PSU was pushed over the edge by the higher power requirements of the new video card. Once I upgraded my PSU to an Enermax 430W booting issues went away. Now when I build a new box, I always spend a little extra on a high-end PSU. (my Silverstone 560W has served me well to date, and I know when I finally do step up to an SLI system, it will have enough juice to get the job done...)