Spent a year travelling while my desktop at home, crashes upon booting

Good detective work Moodus, this will be helpful for us and those searching with Google.

Moodus said:

Honestly what pointed me to it was that after all my research and testing, I narrowed it down to a hardware issue. I tested my HDD and that was fine. Cleaned out my heat sinks, applied new thermal paste, etc. I figured it had to be either the mother board or the PSU.

I was getting a lot of BSOD's, and in Event Viewer I was noticing that a lot of my crashes were due to "Kernel Power Failure" or other Kernel things.

Since the PSU is the power source, and it is also cheaper and easier to install/ take out than the mother board, I figured I'd just swap it out and try.

It worked

Hmm moodus mate a good little program to have on to test that sort of stuff is HW Info HWiNFO, HWiNFO32/64 - Download see my dittty and pic

Using HW Info

You can test the volts on the PSU with HWInfo HWiNFO, HWiNFO32/64 -Download < download the right bit version andclose the right hand window select Sensors and scroll down to the power sectionwhere you will see what the volts are doing see my pic.

The original right hand window shows themachine running and is handy for that but for looking at the components in some detail close it and use themain left hand side panel

FOR OTHER COMPONENTS

Open each + down into the componentitself and then click on it - in theright hand side will appear all sorts of details including brands speeds andother essential info that device. See pic for example.

I have learned so much, just following this Thread to its conclusion. Thanks to all involved who helped Moodus I guess, but special Kudos to Moodus for staying with the processes involved, great patience.

This Forum is a special place!