PC Works Here But Not There

[hillmanant]

Hello Techies

Long story short I fixed an old PC for a friend and it works great at my home but when he took it home it starts for a bit then the screen turns off and says "Monitor Self test" thing with red, blue, and green bar. I have to do a hard reset after this to get the screen to register again.


Now the long story, what started out the fixing was the PC would turn on for random amounts of time, sometime it would go out right when windows started or even after windows had been on for a while, rarely at the same point in boot time, after this random time the screen would go black and the " MONITOR SELF TEST, YOUR MONITOR IS WORKING CORRECTLY, CHECK COMPUTER POWER AND MONITOR CABLE." My first thought was the monitor was going to hell, I switched it out with a spare of mine and same thing it just says "No Input" after a random amount of time. Next step was video drivers, so I load into safe mode and it still crashed. At this point I took the tower home and worked on it from there.

First I fixed the HDD, the read arms were slapping loud in there so I put in a fresh one with a clean install of Windows XP SP3, figured this would take care of the driver issue if there was any. After that I did all the updates and installed Chrome, and Microsoft Security Essentials, Updated everything and ran security scans. After this there was no monitor black out, I even ran a YouTube video for 12-15 hours just to see if it would fail, to no avail I figured it's fixed .

My frind brought the PC back home and the same BS , same black screen at random times requiring a hard restart. So I took all my monitor, corded keyboard, and corded mouse over to his house(the same stuff i had plugged into it at my house) and the black no input screen would appear at random intervals.

So I returned home with the whole works again plug it in and it works great. WTF ?

Specs: Gateway 510x, NV730 Monitor, and everything stock out of the box PC.

Thanks In Advance

 

[RealBeast]

I would run MEMTEST86 if you haven't yet, and then run Prime 95 to see if it might be a heat issue.

Do you use a UPS that he might not be using?

 

[hillmanant]

UPS? You mean USB? I took it to his place with all the same stuff(Monitor,Keyboard,Mouse) I used at mine and it still does it, I'll try MEMtest and see what it says, I know memory issues can produce all kinds of weird problems but it works fine at my place why would it be different at his? Is it possible something went wrong with the wiring in his house that's the only thing different, I even used an alternate Power cord thinking it could be something wrong with it.

 

[wanderer11]

It's possible his outlet is bad. Did you try a couple different ones?

 

[hillmanant]

It's possible his outlet is bad. Did you try a couple different ones?

No but that's what I'm down to Memtest86 came up clean. I can't think of any other reason.

 

[RealBeast]

UPS? You mean USB? I took it to his place with all the same stuff(Monitor,Keyboard,Mouse) I used at mine and it still does it, I'll try MEMtest and see what it says, I know memory issues can produce all kinds of weird problems but it works fine at my place why would it be different at his? Is it possible something went wrong with the wiring in his house that's the only thing different, I even used an alternate Power cord thinking it could be something wrong with it.

Actually yes, I meant UPS (uninterrupted power supply), while a reach, power sags briefly below 88-90V can cause a lot of issues.

I do think though that a memory issue would be a more likely problem and random. If the memory is the problem, once it is replaced I would do a repair install, as the OS install could be damaged.