Computer not starting up - Any ideas?

[Mishandled]

I have a packard bell desktop that is about 5 years old, and I use it for wordprocessing. I turned it off last week, and when I turned it on again, rather than do a POST, it does nothing at all. I can hear the fan running, and the power light comes on on the front of the box, but nothing else happens. No keyboard lights, the monitor does not wake up, nothing. Both the monitor and the keyboard work fine with another machine that I have so I don't think that that is the problem. The machine is a celeron running Win 98se btw.

So far I have tried a boot floppy (nothing), and a boot CD (again nothing). Any ideas?

[HelenD]

Does it give any beeps at all during a post? if you dont get any beeps the problem is likely to be with the ROM, memory or motherboard, if it beeps more than twice you will need to find someone who knows the beep cods for your motherboard.
I have seen a PC fail to start because the reset button was half pushed in. Not being a hardware expert there is not much else i could suggest, replacing the CMOS battery may help but as ypour PC sounds completly dead you may have a BIOS reset to do -unfortunatly I am just guessing here.

[Mishandled]

Thanks for the reply. It does not beep at all.

[Spitoon]

If it's not beeping or running the POST I would start by suspecting the processor.

Make sure it's seated properly, take it out and put it back in, kick it, stuff like that.

When you take the lid off do check that the fan on the processor is running. If it isn't then there's every chance that the processor has been cooked.

Getting more technical - if that doesn't get it going or if the processor fan has failed, you might try swapping the processor that you know works - if you know where there is one.

[ck4707]

Mishandled

Which fan can you hear running, the power supply, the case fan or the processor?

It sounds to me as though the power supply might have failed or the power supply connector to the motherboard has become dislodged.

If the power supply fan is not running, this is the major cause of over 95% of power supplies failing.

Hope this helps

CK

[Loose rivets]

I'm really a dinosaur now, but some of the electronic basics are the same.

Given that you have taken some logical steps, you will have to check that the PSU is OK now.

If I could tell you about my last problem it will give a few clues as to the pit-falls of fault finding.

Daughter in law's twin Pentium with film editing suite failed one day after c3years use. Dead. No voltage on the power cables. A kind dealer tested the PSU for me, and it was OK...however, when it was put back in it was silent again. I removed a horribly expensive graphics card first, and then everything that was in the slots. Then the drives etc.. Started to look like the MB.

Hated doing it, but pulled the two pents. and the memory...still nothing. Then I spotted it. There was a quarts ‘speaker' on the MB, yet, there was the mini speaker still connected to the MB (still connected for me to monitor.)

I took the speaker connections off, and hey-presto! Power. And beeps! Re built system and away it went.

Close inspection of the speaker and connections showed that it had been installed on a MB that had been changed slightly and the "Dealer" (having received $30,000 for this kit) had not noticed that now there was no requirement for a speaker, and fitted one to two pins that had a hard 5v on them!!! The speech coil had cooked immediately, and then fused, but years later had presumably vibrated to a short again.

The lesson was, that when you strip to a clean board...really strip. Look for the most unlikely...nuts and bolts between case and MB etc etc

Go down to CPU and memory only, then get rid of the memory next. One more step to a bare board.

Good luck LR