Had this pc about 15 months. The ethernet port was playing up. IThe port would turn off thus I would lose inernet access. This seems to have happened after a vista update. I loaded in Nvidia drivers and it continued to happen. I decided to put a new PCI ethernet card. Upon reboot as the title states the pc starts to boot and shuts down after 3 seconds. I have removed the new card and all other cards. I have tested the PSU with a voltage checker. I have tested the power button. All those mentioned are in working order. The PSU puts outs the correct voltage.
You cannot switch the pc on from the power on button at the front of the case, only from the PSU switch. The fans all start and I here the hard disk tick over then shut down every time.
3 seconds is not enough time to get any VGA output so I cant see any bios loading.
Any input would be great. If anyone else has had this issue, I would love to hear from you.
It could be CPU temperature - I had something happening on a box with bad temperature control and solved by changing the CPU fan. But you would hear the beeps.
There isn't such a thing as "BIOS and drivers". The drivers are loaded by the OS and three seconds is not long enough to even start loading the OS so I don't think it's the problem.
It could be memory, but it's hard to test without being able to boot.
My computer did the same thing, it turned out that the on/off switch was bracket broken, so when I turned the computer on, it stayed pressed and shut down again, I know this a low tech answer but like everone else here I first thought it was some thing more.
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