PC with Mondayitis?

[netsense]

Hi all,

In November 2009 we built up 2 PCs for a customer:; ASUS M4A78 Pro 4 Motherboard, AMD AthlonII Quad Core 630 CPU, Kingston 4GB DDR2 RAM, ASUS eN8400GS Silent VGA Card, Western Digital 500GB HDD, Super Multi DVD Writer, Antec Black Tower Case, Silverstone 500W Power Supply, Logitech Cordless 1500 Desktop, Microsoft Windows 7 Pro64. There are two of these systems installed, located around 3m from one another.

One of them has developed a consistent problem that every Monday morning (the business is closed Saturday afternoon and Sunday), or every morning after a public holiday, the system boots only after a 20-minute cycle through System Repair. On every other day, it boots fine. I have examined the logs, and no information is found - probably because there is no crash. Recently, to resolve other (probably unrelated) issues, I had to rebuild the system, reinstalling Windows on a reformatted system partition; however, the problem persists, implying a hardware issue. The other system, located nearby, does not exhibit this behaviour, and I can identify no specific environmental issues that could contribute to this: the systems will cool to pretty much the same temperature in the the same time. To fix this problem, I need to know what to replace!

Can anyone point me in any useful direction - even to some tool that will point me towards a solution?

Thanks,
Edwin

[Andrey R]

Wow... Mondayitis? Haha.. that's a first.

My first guess would be the power supply unit. PSUs are interesting pieces of hardware. They die slowly, cause intermittent problems, and the symptoms of a dying PSU can be mistaken for RAM problems, software problems, or even other hardware problems. The PC being powered off for a little bit over 2 days is the only thing that is different from any other boot. Maybe the PSU runs fine when it's "warmed up."

I can also see Norton (or any other anti-virus that might have a scheduled scan during the Windows boot process) causing something like this to happen.


Keep us posted on what you find! I'm very curious on what it is.


- Andrey