bad motherboard???

[Maskan]

My 1 year old, refurbished Sony Vaio RX670 mini-tower (1.8GHz P4, 512MB DDR RAM, TNT 32MB came-with-computer graphics card) recently developed a bad case of the freezes. The mouse woul stop moving and the whole system became totally unresponsive. I took it into a computer shop to be remedied (since I am a relative beginner when it comes to hardware) after numerous attempts to find a problem with software. Their original diagnosis was that I needed a new heatsink fan. They replaced it, but a week later it began freezing up again. I took it back, they said it was a program called WinGate. Uninstalled it, it kept freezing. Then I took it back in and they said I need a new motherboard. I took the comp. back and I've been sitting on it trying to figure out what to do with it. I'm not convinced it is the mobo, since they've been wrong in the past and I don't want to invest all that money and energy into replacing the mobo if that's not the problem. I even tried reformatting the HDs but the computer froze before I could even start that.

My computer still starts up, only into safe mode at the moment. But it still turns on and everything before it freezes up. Sometimes it freezes while the XP screen comes up. Sometimes it makes it all the way up. My question is this: could it be my mobo that is causing the problem, or would it not even be able to turn on if my mobo was shot? If not, what could be some possible reasons? Bad RAM? Bad processor? Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Maskan

[Telexen]

You say it froze before you could re-install the OS...it sounds like it could be some bad RAM

First make sure that the RAM modules are in the right slots...Obviously you'll have DIMM1, DIMM2, DIMM3, etc...but make sure the first module is in DIMM1, the second in DIMM2, etc.

If it looks okay there, try taking out all but one stick of RAM, and try to install the OS. If it locks up on that attempt, take out the only remaining stick of RAM, and put in another stick of RAM (if you have more than one stick), repeat the process until you've tried them all.

Let us know how it goes.

[Maskan]

Thanks for all your advice. However, after putting a heatsink fan back on (after a battle with the computer techs who "fixed" my computer in the first place, they kept the new heatsink fan and I got the few bucks for it), my computer did something new. I hadn't turned it on since last taking it in, and it was acting up in the ways I described in my first post.

Now... when I turn it on, the monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers are all unresponsive. They light up with the intial turning-on of the computer, but then nothing. The computer whirs and the lights on the actual computer flicker, but no signal goes to any of the peripherals. It had never been this bad before, so I'm not sure what to think. Is it the bad motherboard, and it was getting continuously worse until now? I tried moving the RAM around to different slots to see if that changed anything, but nope. Could it still be power supply issue?

-Maskan