t20 motherboard power problems?

[mcf]

Hello,

I've got a t20 which seems to have a power problem since
the harddrive and CPU fan seem to shutdown every now and then, and the whole thing freezes as well and usually doesn't even boot past early bios checks.

I've tried with battery only, AC power and a car adapter attached to a 'switching power supply' at home. Also, all parts except mobo, sub card, CPU, fan and the keyboard have been removed. And both available memory chips have been tried in both of the slots, with similar results. When there's no disks attached, before a crash I can hear the CPU fan speeding up and then suddenly stopping for a few times, and the switching psu also stops it's whining at the same time.

Initially, few months ago, I thought it was a hard disk issue, but the travel star worked in my desktop IDE bus, and the brand new Seagate makes similar sounds before crashes if it ever gets to do some work.

I have taken all parts off and used some compressed air to clean the thing.

Kind of funny, but last weekend the t20 managed to work just fine during a two hour car trip with the car power adapter.

The t20 has always been really hot under the hard disk and cpu, but the fan is running properly and the cooling element is clean. To my amateur eye, the motherboard doesn't seem to have any loose components.

My local second hand dealer will prompt me if they find a t20 mobo so spare, but what else could I try in the mean time?

Thanks,

-Mikko

[mcf]

Knoppix download finished, so it seems that booting from the CD drive without a hard disk is more stable. I'm leaving memtest on to see if the thing halts with similar symptoms during memory load.

-Mikko