Tom try removing the left side and having a look inside. You are looking for dust build up on the fan and heatsink on top of your processor. Perhaps it is shutting down due to heat to protect your CPU.

You can use a can of compressed air but hold your finger on the fan while spraying so the blades do not spin wildly. If you have no compressed air van use a pure bristle paint brush to loosen and blow in there - best done outdoors unless you want to spent your holiday weekend dusting the house.

Are Americans taking Friday or Monday off for July 4th?

definitely do as owbist advised and while in there check for any loose cables etc, also it could be power supply related, could be going bad.
Try unplugging it from the wall socket also then replugging and reboot, sometimes electricity does weird things.

owbist the way it generally works is if the holiday falls on Saturday it is celebrated on Friday and if it falls on Sunday it is celebrated on Monday. Actually that is not true. It is celebrated on the day it falls but the day taken off work is.... well you know what I mean I hope. Darned English language anyway.

A bit more of a clarification: There are at times that there are conflicts between the Federal, state and union contractual recognition of holidays. Financial institutions are most often tied to whether the Federal Reserve is open or not. Companies associated with Wall Street ride its tail and when it is open. Negotiated labor agreements are all over the map. Retailers tend not to care too much for celebrating holidays, but rather their sales promotions. So nationally if the holiday has a dedicated date, i.e Christmas or July 4th, it is celebrated on that day. The rest can be quite varied.

DA

My gut reaction is power supply. Are you getting any beeps?

We appreciate all the comments. Our son suggests it maybe the motherboard.

We are not getting even a flicker on the monitor and the only sound is what I call the whirring sound a computer makes when starting up. That only lasts a few seconds and then it quits,

We've taken it to a local computer shop and we'll see what he has to say. I suspect he'll say "junk it."

I'll let you all know what his diagnosis is.

Again, many thanks for the input.

Have a Happy Independence Day.

To give you all an up-date. Were we surprised when the local shop called and said your computer is ready. It turned out to be the power supply. Anyway, Susan is a happy camper, again. ;-)

Some of you had suggested it maybe the power supply. This is the third power supply for this machine. But, we escaped having to buy a new machine for now.

Again, many thanks for all the help.

That's good, but I have to ask: How much have you paid to have three power supplies replaced? Given how cheap new machines are and the fact that a new machine would help you get things done faster, you should still consider a new one before that dinosaur shuffles off to its final resting place. You can get a decent Dell laptop or desk top for under $400 these days.

Kudzu,

When I said 3, I was including the original one. Two replacements came to about $90. The first time, our son diagnosed it and it was a DIY project, was about $30. This last time in a local computer shop it was $60 which I felt was reasonable today. He advertised free estimates which enticed us to go there. This is a small community and we'd had mixed reports on the other local shop. We were pleased. We had recently had our dryer checked out and were charged about $70 to be told it was not worth fixing.

As to a new computer, that would be nice, but not in our current budget.

Thanks for the additional thoughts. Best wishes,

power supplies come in various sizes it sounds like they may be putting too small of one on your machine if it keeps happening like that. I always have mine replaced with a nice size one if it goes bad, larger than the original.

In this case, the repair person was supposed to have given us an estimate, but called and said your computer is ready. In other words, he went ahead and installed one. We were thankful this was the only issue.

I was pleased with his pricing but not that he took it on himself to make our decision. However, most likely I'd have made the same decision, given the choice. The old one was a 350 watt which was an up-grade in size over the original one. I had felt it adequate for this vintage of machine.

This is an 800MH machine running Win 2K with 256 RAM and a 30GB HD. It's sued for surfing and as a word processor and e-mails. No heavy duty requirements.

So, is 350W enough for these purposes?