question for you computer guys

[xka24detx]

my friend's gf bought him new hardware for his pc so i installed it and trying to reinstalling windows but i cant figure out why the computer is shutting down randomly, the longer i leave it off the longer it will stay on without shutting down but wont stay on longer than like 3 min, abit nf8-v2 motherboard, amd athlon 64 3000+, kingston 512mb hyper x memory, 150gb serial ata hdd, and i cant remember the name of the video card right now, i removed all of his aux led fans, and all led's and other switches just main power switch to try and track down maybe something is shorting, but nothing, could it be the power supply? its a 350w but its kinda old, cause when i do have his little led fan plugged in, right before it shuts off i see the leds dim

[L1ama]

http://www.lavalys.com/products/download.php?pid=3&dlid=36&lang=en
Download it, install it, once you install it, go to sensor, in about 10-20 second time period you should get all of the temperature readings for your shit, like hard drive, if your cpu is over 50c, or anything else you think will be too hot, my computer is just a motherboard out in the open, the dust always gets on my northbridge chipset, and my computer goes into some safety thing, where a blue screen pops up, and it shuts off, also happens when I overclock it too much, any more details like did you put together the comp yourself? Is it dusty will help.
It should look like this
http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/4531/msiss6wy.th.jpg (http://img96.imageshack.us/my.php?image=msiss6wy.jpg)

[statik]

Could possibly be overheating, would make sense as to why when you leave it off longer, it stays on longer(its cooled down =]). Did you use thermal paste? is the heatsink on tight? Go into the bios when you boot up and check the cpu temp, or check in windows if you have software installed.

[Akiros]

fucking computer, and zilvia, and multiple posts.... ANYWAYS, I was saying that dust could get in the dimm slots, once it happened to me, I cleaned them off and it was fine. Its probably not the psu(power supply unit), but it is a possibility, anyways, run memtest86 on it and see if it clears it. if it does, make sure everything is connected securely, and make sure temperatures are ok (you did use thermal grease, right?) and after all that, it could be the psu, but anyhoo, check the ram

[magice03]

I would try using a different power supply first.

[L1ama]

Oh yea also, the power supplies have like 20 pins or something, and motherboard has 24 pins, look at the motherboard, see if you can see 4 opened pins, because people mismatch psu's when they build computers, and tell me how are the temperature readings? Okay, I found a pic online of that motherboard, it has 24 pins, unless I counted it too fast, well anyway, old psu's are usually 20 pin, so its not enough to power up everything, and it eventually crashes, if you have any further computer questions, you know who'se da man.

[xka24detx]

okay so yeah i figured out it was his power supply, works fine now when i took the one out of my extra comp... thanks guys