On average HP's "problems per 100 units" is bad. Unfortunately playing the statistics game isn't a granular enough way to find the good units. That's why I specifically mentioned the DV7T. It has a very good track record and high satisfaction rate. You can't just say "company bad" and lump...
Quick power loss and return ( or even just sudden power loss ) can cause electrical current to stray into places it's not supposed to. It sounds to me like a capacitor on your motherboard is blown or an inductor somewhere in the USB circuits shorts when it heats up. Either way, I recommend...
I know you said you aren't all that knowledgeable...but you probably know more than many G**k Squad employees sadly. The Dynex brand is not known for quality or anything like that. I recommend you move to a nice single-12V rail PSU like the Corsair 650W. You can get them at Newegg.com -...
I'd lean towards the HP. I setup a lot of new PC's and laptops and in the past year I've seen Dell's quality dropping while HP seems rock solid. I went with the DV7T myself.
Step 1 - Confirm power button connector is attached to the correct pins.
Step 2 - Verify that you connected the 4-pin or 8-pin supplemental power connectors ( I'm leaning toward this as the cause ).
Step 3 - If it's still not working, take a paperclip and connect one of the green pins to one of...
It's probably not the monitor...you need more info to diagnose it, but I think she just needs to mess with the dual monitor settings in Windows...also confirm she's not plugging one monitor into onboard and another into dedicated video card or something like that.
Unplug the power cable, leave it unplugged for a full hour. BEFORE you plug it back in, repeatedly tap the power button for about 30 seconds. There's a good chance that will get you back up and running as it resets some of the power circuits ( by discharging them ). The problem may reoccur...
I agree on pulling out the video card and trying onboard. Had the same problem and I ended up having to update bios to get my video card recognized properly.
You sort of answer your own question. You aren't using thermal paste, you know the fans aren't doing their jobs...so yeah, it's overheating. If you really want to fix it you need to get a heatsink with working mounts, clean it up real good and thermal paste it properly ( thin even layer )...
Even though you have a liquid cooler, let's get some important info. Download a temperature checking app like Speed Fan and please post your temperatures in here. Also please briefly describe the installation you did of the heatsink. I'm mostly interested in if everything seemed to lockdown...
I personally recommend Newegg.com - Antec Nine Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case with Upgraded USB 3.0 or it's big brother the 1200, because the mobo you're looking at is one capable of supporting some pretty "hot" hardware. I use the 1200 for my PC and temps are nice and cool.
I recommend you uninstall the video driver in safe-mode and then see if it reboots normally. If it does, go to ASUS' website and grab the updated graphics driver (and get BIOS too). That will most likely take care of your problem.
Also, if you ever see a video driver in Windows updates from...