Hey everyone. The posts here seem well informed, so I will try my best....

I came in this morning to find my computer off. I never turn it off, so this was odd.

I try turning it on, and I get the fans to spin, but it turns off right away again. After that, the power button is unresponsive. I try replugging it, switching outlets and chords, and it turns on again in the same fashion immediately when I plug it in (no power button touched) But it turns off again anyway

I have opened it up and cleaned the dust (not much there anyhow), but it still has the same problem.

I am running XP Pro, ASRock K7S41GX mobo, 300w PSU. Unsure of processor.

It has been running fine for almost 3 years, and I did not recently install anything.

Thanks in advance all.

Open, take out the RAM chips, clean the slots with some compressed air and reseat them, then try again....
The only other culprit could be the power supply, some power spike might have killed it...
Usually it is good to switch the PC off once in a while....
Let us know if this worked....

Well, the RAM cleaning didn't work

I will take one of the power supplies out of the old computers here and see if it will work...

i will post results.

Well, new power supply didn't work either.

Oh well....on a related note, can I just swap the harddrive from the poochy computer to another? Are there conflicts with the mobo to worry about? Sounds like that would be too easy for Microsoft to allow.

EDIT:

found this on a diff post ..
If you have an XP installation disc (-not- a recovery disc) and the operating system was installed from it on the old system then you can do a repair install. This will preserve the applications. However, you will need to install drivers for the new system and reinstall the XP critical updates.

You can take the hdd from the dead computer and install it as a slave drive in a different computer. The jumper on the rear of the hdd will need to be placed in the slave position, and the master hdd will need its' to be in the master position. The middle connector of the IDE cable is where you attach the slave drive.

I would not put this hdd into another computer as the master, it has recognized the drivers for the motherboard of the other computer and will start looking for the drivers for the new motherboard. The OS may not survive this, it confuses the hell out of it.