other backstory/info: built this main rig of mine in 2004, still using same parts except new motherboard cause i wanted a microATX to hide its greatness/make it compact for college, i returned to my house after a year, booted up my computer an Asus P4C800deluxe (and an 'whatever the microatx version of that is' also) 3.2 P4 (prescott right?) ATI Radeon X800 2x 1gb Corsair 800mhz DDR RAM and got the wonderful ol' "you have not connected the power cable to your video card. please refer to the 'getting started guide' for proper hardware installation" , i remembered it doing that a few times before i left a year before.. i remembered just rebooting it once, or sometimes a couple times, and it would boot into BIOS normally i also remember it booting just fine without the card having its molex plugged in at all, getting enough power from the AGP port itself, so i rebooted it a few times, but instead of righting/booting normally like it would used to, it just came up blank, all the parts whirred and spinned but no display, i didnt touch anything other than the power button to cause it to not display at all pretty sure there was nothing wrong with the old mobo when i switched it out for college a couple years back, its just been sitting around but i tried moving all the parts from the micro mobo to the old,big mobo and i still got nothing, SO i went and got, and have been using an old pre-assembled computer's (its a Sony so ill refer to it at "the sony") 1.6ghz P4 & MoBo to check against my main rig's parts i fidgeted with it off and on for two days trying other agp cards, putting the 3.2CPU on the bigger P4Cmobo, putting my old Sony 1.6CPU on both of the newer Asus Mobos, etc... finally it just worked, i dont know what i did but it actually worked with the original combination of parts, on the microatx mobo, surprised, i shut it down and tried the sony's 1.6ghz on the microatx mobo and it worked too! so i put the 3.2 back on the microatx and i put the 3.2 on the P4C, and that worked too! so i had two working comps all of a sudden not including the old sony mobo I used the original combination 3.2/microatx for 3 days (and during these three days using windows 7, it would just randomly shut off sometimes, and randomly restart other times after about 5-6 hours of heavy or light use, always about that amount of time, even without my soundcard/roms/hard drives plugged in) until suddenly upon 2 reboots, i got the no power cable plugged message, and then back to the blank display... so im back where i started, its not displaying, :4-dontkno so the 1.6 processor was working on the P4C before, but once i took it off, to retest the 3.2 which had failed again on the microatx, neither worked on the p4c either, i'm not sure what im doing thats casuing them to work sometimes i have 4 as far as i know perfectly working AGP cards, an X800, an old 9200, and two old ass primitive ones, i switched em all out once i got it running for a few days before it crashed it and they all worked so i wanted to assume it was my 3.2cpu, but the 1.6 isnt workin now either, i wanted to assume it was both my mobos, but the 3.2 doesnt work on the old SONY mobo (from like yr2000-2001), do faster P4 not work on older P4 mobos? or am i jsut having a weird coincidence? i tried booting with two diff pairs of ram, and once i got my comp working the first time, i did a windows memtest on both my 2x 1gb RAM sticks and my 2x 512mb RAM sticks and it came out with no errors, so what else should i try? how do i figure out if its my mobos or my CPU or something else? you guys' time and input is forever appreciated if i find the oppurtunity to return/pass on the favor ill be taking it doubly, thanks
