Ok I have a unique situation here. I am a american living overseas in Germany. Which means I have to run all my american appliances through a transformer. It transforms the current from 220 to 110. Now here is the problem. I have a BRAND new Dell XPS 410 system with a 500 gig sata drive in. It also has the dual core chip in it. and 2 gig of memory. A week out of the box it started to make noise like the drive was powering down and then would go clunk. Call the pc manufacturer....described what was happening...They said they would send me a new drive out. I kept on using the old one till jsut the other day it finally would not boot up. It is also running windows vista. it would get to the black microsoft screen with the bar across the bottom and would not boot. I am a pc tech...So I ran a few diagnostics and the drive had read write errors. So on to the second part of this....I also recieved a external western digital Mybook 250 gig hard drive. Was using that today on my old system when it too started to make that powering down noise. I picked up the drive and listened to it and I could hear nothing. No sound nothing. So unplugged the drive...Drove up to the military base and picked up a new surge suppressor...thinking that might be the problem. Got a good one that will also telling me if the house has bad wiring and if it gets overloaded. I plug all my stuff into that and what do you think happens a few hours later???? It starts to make that powering down noise again. I am at my witts end. Not sure what to do. I have not had this problem with the old system. Just this one. Thought it could have been that I got shipped a system with a bad drive in it. But now it does not sound like because of the external drive acting that same way now...and they are two complete different drives by two different manufactures. the internal drive is also a sata drive. Not sure if that is needed info but thought I would include it. Can anyone help me. I spent tooo much money on this system to have it die on me. Plus already transfered about 100 gig of data that I can not lose onto the new external back up drive....how many back up drives do I have to have in order to protect my data???
Michelle
pss sorry so long winded.

Heya Michelle39 Welcome to PCHF

It sounds like either your power supply may be bad, or your power supply is overloaded. How many watts are in the power supply and what kind of hardware are you running? Is the PSU switched to the right voltage? Does the PSU have a green light and if so, does it stay constant green? Do you have another PSU that you can test in your unit?

Instead of a surge suppressor, you might want to get a good, high wattage, long life battery back up...that way if the voltage is irregular, the battery can keep good power to your unit. Will cost a few bucks, but if you are concerned about power, that would be the better way to go.

Let's go from there!

Ok there are two different power supplies. The power supply for the desktop is 375 w. And it is a brand new Dell XPS 410 With the dual core chip and 2 gig of mem, also has 2 drives one is a cd rom and the other is a dvd rom. and the power supply is switched the 110 power because I have it running through a 110-220 transformer. and yes the PSU has a green light and it stays constant green. No I do not have another power supply I can use. But I am not thinking that is the problem.Becasue I also have the western digital external hard drive that has a external power supply. and it is doing the same thing. but also I am currently using my old HP desktop system. That I would leave running for weeks on end and never have any problems with. I have it plugged into the same transformer that the new system and external hard drive was plugged into. The old hp was also switched to 110 and running through the same transformer.
Michelle

That is an odd issue. It really sounds like some sort of power problem. It is definitely a hardware issue. So basically you need to unplug everything except for one stick of memory and see if it continues to give you that issue. Just boot the computer up with no hard drive, video card, modem, network card, etc etc and leave it up and running even though you won't have an OS. If you still have power down issues, then it has to be the motherboard.

If after unplugging everything you see that it stays booted, then just keep adding components until you have problems. If the last thing you hook back up is your replacement hard drive and it causes the problem then, then I would think it is either not enough power in the power supply, or bad chipset (motherboard).

Hope that helps

Ok I will try all of that but since I had the new external hard drive plugged into my old hp system it also started to do that. The external drive that is....not the hp. And everything is plugged into the new surge suppressor. *scratches head* lol
Michelle

Ok...now that is just confusing...

It's like your Dell is cursing any hard drive that connects to it. Honestly, I can't even begin to think what is happening. Seems like just a bunch of coincidences...