Power light turns on but nothing else happens

Hi,
Wondering if someone could shine a little light my way. My boyfriend has an emachine desktop W4682 and just tonight it has started giving me two problems.
First when turning on the pc the power light turns on and stays on, you can hear the fan humming but nothing else happens... no signal to the monitor. Something that I noticed was that the light for the dvd+-rw drive stayed on too. Thinking that maybe the dvd drive might be the problem, I opened the tower and disconnected the dvd drive. So far so good. The pc turned on and booted completely. After a couple of minutes of using the pc I started getting an error that said "power surge on hub port" and all I could do (after reading a few posts here and there) is turn off the usb alert on the advanced options.
For now I am able to use the pc but I'm worried that I might be causing it some permanent damage by leaving it as is. Best idea yet is to buy a better power supply? Anybody got a better one?

*Not expecting miracles here. I know of the little potential the emachines have*

 

G'day Myzteryh, these kinds of problems present difficult answers, quite obviously there is a malfunction of some type but what is the best course of action.
It is possible that some kind of malfunction has happened within the DVD combo or some other problem has affected the DVD combo but not knowing becomes difficult. The usb indication also is a consideration.
You could take it to a shop but they probably would not do more than what I am about to suggest.
It would probably be pertinent to obtain "Everest Home" off the net, (google it, Lavalys) this is an analysis program that can be helpful, remove any unneccessary USB stuff, load the Everest program, if you are able to, open it, then open the computer icon in it, then open the sensors section. This will show voltages and temperatures within the machine. If you could somehow copy and paste that page here would be nice, reallly what we are most interested in is the voltage readings, you can expect the table to show suggested readings on the left and actual readings on the right. I do feel you may find some way to achieve this without much problem and we may be able to work out what may be happening.
Do not leave the machine running for any period longer than neccessary at this time. (give it some thought)
If any of the twelve volt readings are above 14 Volts just switch it off and replace the power unit without any further testing.
There may be other ideas on how to address this problem.

Cheers, qldit.