Help, My pc keeps shutting down at start up

I hope some one can help me with this, my pc turns off by its self when I try to turn it on, it get to the welcome screen and the music plays as soon as I see the desktop it turns off by its self. If I try to turn it back on right away it turns off even faster, like only after a few seconds. But if I leave it off for a while it will get to the desktop (unpopulated) before it turns off. It’s a dell pc 2360 bios A01 about 2 years old, I tried to get into the safe mode but it turns off there too. Is this a hardware problem? Software? Power issue? It’s driving me nuts.
Appreciate any advice you guys can give me.

 

i had a problem like that once ..i found out it was a virus causing it see if u can boot up into safe mode ..

 

I tried but before it gets into the safe mode it shuts down.

 

Can you stick your XP (or whatever Dell provided with the pc) into the cd drive and boot with that? If you have a bootable cd or diskette of some sort and you are able to boot the computer then I would tend to rule out hardware problems.

If you cannot boot with a bootable cd or floppy then maybe you have a hardware problem. You can google your symptoms or search the forum and read about removing specific hardware and restarting to find if it is hardware related.

What I would do (whether or not it is the best choice, I don't know), is to stick your cd-- XP or Dell cd-- into the drive and see if the computer shuts down right away. You don't have to install anything, just let it sit there. If it doesn't shutdown then maybe it is software related.

A Linux LiveCD or a Win98 startup floppy would work.

 

Ok I think the problem is solved, I thought that this might be a heat issue since the longer the pc was left off the longer it stayed on before it shut down so I opened the case checked the fans and the heat sink and found that the heat sink was not completely attached to the CPU due to a broken clip holder. So I jerry rigged one out of a paper clip and attached the clip back down and the thing is working fine now. (fingers crossed).

Posting this so hopefully if some one has the same problem as I did this might be another thing they could check.

Thanks for the reply guys.