A little mystery game. The winner gets my eternal gratitude.
A little less than a year ago, I got an Alienware PC. Paid a little more for what I thought would be higher quality. Right out of the box, it had a faulty power supply. Anytime I ran a game or other graphics intensive program that pushed the video card
at all, the whole PC would power down. They had a description of this occurrence in their knowledge base stating it was caused by a bad batch of power supplies. Despite my pointing out that this was an exact description of my problem, I got several different "solutions" to try. After several months of getting fed up enough to ask for intermittent tech support solutions (check this, check that, make sure the fans are clear), they finally came out and replaced the generic power supply with a quality Enermax one. Yay, it didn't shut down anymore. Oh, how short lived the joy was.
A few weeks later, the computer wouldn't even turn on. Push the power button and the LED indicator would light up, the fans would spin around once, and then nothing else. Called tech support again. Spent who knows how long pulling out every part in there, and putting them all back to make sure it wasn't the vid card/memory/HD/etc. So they get me to ship it to them. A week or two later, it comes back with a note saying they "could not reproduce the error". Plug the computer in, it comes on. Turn it off... and it won't come back on anymore. Same as before, power indicator LED comes on, fans spin around for a second (seems like a very short burst of power), nothing else. Tried different power cords, different outlets, etc. Same result.
So here I sit with a 3k "high quality" PC that, almost a year later, has only had a few blissful moments of full functionality. I would call tech support (again), but they've proved thoroughly incompetent. For crap sake, they sent it back to me with the same exact problem! Now before I start beating in heads to get a full, complete refund for this POS, I'm hoping somebody here is a good enough computer sleuth to tell me how to fix this problem.
In summary;
Everything from the memory to the modem has been removed to check if any of these parts were at fault.
Tried different outlets, power cords, surge protectors, etc. with no effect.
The power LED comes on, the fans spin very briefly, then nothing else. No beeps, sounds, images on the monitor, etc.
Motherboard LED is good and green as well.
So WTF is wrong with this thing?