Hardware or software issue?

[Overclok]

I've been trying for hours to fix my friends computer.. It has a Tseries? motherboard in it, some knockoff psu, and is just generally cheap.  Anyway, both the keyboard and mouse (and any other usb device it seems) stops working about 30 seconds after booting into normal windows 7.  The backlighting on the keyboard and mouse work fine for a bit, but then start to flicker and go out completely.  They come back for 2-3 seconds, then off again.  To me, this seems like the psu isn't pushing enough power to make the devices work, or something on the mobo is broken and causing the same power issue, but everything works fine in safe mode.  Does safe mode consume much less power?  Seems like it might be a driver issue because everything works in safe mode, but every mouse and keyboard we tried did the same thing.  The psu tester i have said that one of the 12V rails wasn't doing anything, and the mobo has some red lights near the I/O and a few more down near the SATA ports, one of which is probably an error code.  What the heck is wrong with this thing?

 

edit: so the mobo is a biostar Tseries, still can't find a model though.

[beefalo]

Re-installing windows is going to be the easiest way to diagnose.  You could also try booting into a linux usb drive or live cd and seeing if the issues persist there.

[Overclok]

I tried booting to backtrack on a USB drive, but the computer wouldn't recognize the drive