I guess I shouldn't have assumed such silly things.
From the way he described his problem I assumed this was a new problem, not associated with a new home, power problem elsewhere etc.
You would think that if the problem was associated with a power problem in his hime that he would be seeing this same symptom on other equiptment as well. Would you not?
I tend not to take power fluctuations and such lightly when it comes to my computer equiptment. When you put over $5,000 into your system (and that is just one of them) the last thing you want to have happen is to let a failing power supply run your system for any longer than necessary. Next thing you know you could end up replacing the majority of your system and not just the PSU. $50 is a small price to pay to save your system from a cheap power supply.
Most of the cases and systems now days come with very cheap power supplies. Just enough to power the system, the way it came. God forbid if you want to add anything else to the box such as a few USB devices or another hard drive etc.
I just had one of my boxes fry itself about 5 months ago due to a failing power supply which was causing the box to overheat. I came home from a weekend away to be told that my computer was beeping continuously all weekend (3 days) but it was still running fine. I turned it off pulled it out of the desk and when my hand was placed on the back of the case I knew right away the power supply had been overheating causing the CPu's to overheat as well. Well there goes that box..... my poor dual celeron was flaky as hell after that and I had to replace the cpu's, motherboard and the PSU. About $500 in all when a good $50 power supply would have saved me.
The first thing I do when I build a system now is rip out that peice of junk power supply and put in a good one.
I would be willing to bet that is where the problem is.
And I wouldn't suggest taking it out and testing it in another system either for fear of blowing up another comp.
Also the battery would not cause this problem either, the battery only helps to keep configuration settings in the BIOS while the computer is not powered on.