Strange Hardware problem?

[Whoseondephone]

I recently had some strange things happen to my windows machine. First let me tell you about my colorful setup:

I'm running a PIII 1Ghz, 512MB RAM 133Mhz

AGP: 4x Geforce FX 5200

PCI: Sound Blaster live 16bit, Linksys LNE 100 Ethernet Adapter, IEEE 1394 SBP2 Device, USB 2.0 card,

2 IDE hard drives.

2 optical drives.

My original power supply stopped working so I found one from a PII system that was berried in my friends room. My original power supply had a power rating of 250W and fit correctly inside of the computer case. My current power supply has a power rating of 200W and kind of hangs in the open case in this empty spot below the hard disks.

OK OS time: I had 3 partitions running 3 different flavors of windows. First I installed windows xp sp2. Second Windows 2003 server sp2. Third Tinny 2003 eXPeriance edition. (a striped down version of windows)

Here is my problem. I hot plugged my firewire hard drive into the 1394 card and the whole computer froze, mouse and all. I had to reboot. When I rebooted Windows froze at the windows boot screen (the moving bar thing froze). So I decided that maybe I blew the firewire/1394 card. After taking It out the computer boots fine. So next I try putting it in a different PCI slot. the computer freezes during boot. So then I take the card to another computer and find out that the card works perfectly in there. I tried booting in different OS's with the card in and the same thing happened in all of them. There were 2 instances where windows froze even with the card out of the computer. So now i pop in a Linux live CD and sometimes it boots and sometimes it doesn't. So now I decide to reformat.

Windows installs fine. When i get back I find that windows froze on the first boot. So then I rip out all of my PCI cards. The computer boots fine. I put them back in in a different order. The computer boots fine but can't find my firewire1394 card. After a closer look I notice that my card isn't inserted in all of the way. I insert the card and everything seems to be working now.

I'm hoping I could receive some clarity on this issue. My guess is that perhaps the power supply is to weak. I don't really understand the whole case power supply motherboard relationship.

I've been running this setup like this for at least 6 months and haven't had any problems like this. I'd love to hear some feed back.

One things for sure. I'll never hot plug anything into a computer again. :D

Thanks

[Scarecrow Man]

My original power supply stopped working so I found one from a PII system that was berried in my friends room. My original power supply had a power rating of 250W and fit correctly inside of the computer case. My current power supply has a power rating of 200W and kind of hangs in the open case in this empty spot below the hard disks.

Thats why :D

I dont think 200w is enough, especially if you have multiple pci cards. Might want to bump that up. I just put a 500w in a p4 (mind you it uses more power) but It's not going to be enough with a lot of usb/firewire and pci devices attached to it drawing power.

Also, your computer started with 250, you added more devices. add more power for those devices ;)