G4 shuts down during boot

[btc]

my B&W G3 had a motherboard failure, so i bought a Yikes G4 because everything from the G3 would fit the G4 and uhhh, i'm poor Sawtooth would have been a better choice but the Yikes was way affordable and i'm not a power user anyway.

This is the problem with the G4: about 25% of the time when i boot the machine seems fine until about 10 seconds into self-check and it just powers down and shuts itself off. other times it boots just fine.

the worst was when it powered down 4 times in a row. i changed the motherboard battery with a fresh one with no change in behaviour. i booted from an install disk and used disk first aid to confirm that the drive is ok.

am i looking at the beginning of a power supply failure?

it's running 10.2

anyone have any ideas?

any help would be very much appreciated.

TIA, Jim

 

[2nyRiggz]

Maybe you shouldn't put anymore money into that machine and buy a brand new intel based mac. The machine is telling you something....listen carefully.

Have you tried:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=2238

Bless

 

[btc]

Maybe you shouldn't put anymore money into that machine and buy a brand new intel based mac. The machine is telling you something....listen carefully.

Have you tried:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=2238

Bless

I would truely like to buy a new intel Mac. How much can you help me out with the purchase?

I did zap the pram (thanks for the link) and it's doing it less, but still occasionally shuts down.

Anybody else got an idea, or a donation towards buying a new Mac?

I'm not totally SOL, i have a 7 day DOA warrantee and a 30 day warrantee against component failure from the refurbisher (BetaMacs.)