Nori Heikkinen wrote:
my old computer's dead as a whole. i determined that it was either the motherboard or processor, and bought a new combo. plugged them in. turned on computer, and all is well! i let it download email for a while, transferred over some files, and went to reboot for some reason. it halted ... and then never came back up. i can't even turn it on now -- the fan whirrs, but it doesn't even get as far as POSTing, and there's no signal to the monitor. this is where i was before -- BUT it was up for two hours! what's wrong? i'm going to go swap around RAM when i get home. but i find it very weird that it booted once, and no longer. tia, </nori>
I've seen similar symptoms occassionally; and about 60% of the time I've been able to resurrect the machine by unplugging everything, removing any expansion cards, taking the mobo out of the case completely and insulating it from anything that might short it, and then plug the video card back in (or use the built-in video) and re-apply the power leads and add the RAM back in, and then power up and see if you get through the post. Don't connect any drives or other devices or LEDs, etc (yes, keep the CPU and CPU fan on the board). If it still fails, you've got some serious problem. If it works, you've probably got a short somewhere (perhaps through an expansion card grounding against the case, etc) that only occurs when the motherboard is installed in the case and all the peripherals plugged in. I've even had one machine do this when the parallel printer cable was attached; unattach it and the machine powered up fine; re-attach it and the machine goes dead (that was back in 386 or 486 days).