hi thx for reply i ran the diagnostics thru hdd health and this is what i got

ulltradma crc error count attribute is very low! check the ide cable, pci frequency and system drivers.

any clues?

I had a problem with "abrupt shutdowns" with a "blinking amber power light". If you do a search in these forums of those two terms you will find postings from many other users with the same problem and can gain much info on the matter. Most of ours were 8400's with 350 watt psu.

 What would happen is the computer would for no apparent reason radomly go into a non responsive state, pretty much shutdown but not all the way, the power light would be blinking amber and you would have to hold in the power button to finish the shutdown and reboot. You would then be either good for a while or not very long as the problem occured very sporadically. The Dell techs were clueless replacing the memory on mine and various other things on other users computers before they finally started replacing the power supply and that was what it was.

I do not know if your problem is the same since most of ours were the same power supply version and yours is differant and we never got error messages with our shutdowns but I would bet it is the power supply and your best bet would be to contact Dell via e-mail as that usually gets a pretty quick response and you don't have to wait 10 ours on the phone and ask for a compatible power supply for your computer and try that. One thing with Dell computers I found out was the Dell motherboards are only compatible with Dell power supplies and if you put an aftermarket one in that could be the problem with yours.