A couple of weeks ago my dad's computer suddenly started running really, really, really slow. Usually this means he's donwloaded and/or installed something he shouldn't have, and my universal solution is to wipe his disk clean, reinstall Windows and his apps, and live happily ever after for about six months or so until he does it again. I have accepted the whole situation as one of life's unpleasant necessities, sort of like going to the dentist.

Anyway, this last time when I got to the "reinstall Windows" part, the computer would turn off its own power about 30-60 seconds after booting from the Windows installation CD. It did the same thing with any combination of two different installation CDs and two different CD drives. It also did the same thing after booting from one of Dell's CDs that wa supposed to have some hardware diagnostics on it.

After discovering that it wouldn't run when booted from the CD, I let it boot normally from the hard disk. It didn't shut itself off again after that, but it was still really, really, really slow.

After many conversations with my geek friends and much Googling, I eventually found the problem and fixed it.

Who can guess what was wrong?

-- Russ