The Gun Counter

I mentioned PC problems in my cable signal thread--it's an older Dell, maybe 2010-2011 vintage. The computer decided not to start. It had been balky at a hard start for some time, though it would do restarts just fine. I made the mistake of shutting it down recently, now it won't start. Sometimes the light illuminates momentarily when the on/off button is pressed, and the fans come on momentarily, then everything goes out again. Sometimes it just fails to do anything when the button is pressed. What would you suspect? On/off button, power supply? I read somewhere that the motherboard CMOS battery might be the culprit. Suggestions?

Any time I have had those symptoms it was the power supply.

It's been a long time since I've done trouble shooting, but one thing that never hurt was a good cleaning and reseating of everything.

First, take the case off.

Then, blow it all out with canned air. (Don't ask me how I know not to use an old air-charged fire extinguisher. )
Then, with good static protection practices, dismount boards one at a time and rub the connections with a clean eraser and put them back in place firmly.
Then, unseat and reseat any memory modules.
Then, unseat each plug (one at a time!) and reseat it firmly.
Then, put the case back on.
Then, start it up.
Then, watch some Uncle Rob videos.

I always called that voodoo repair and told the client that the Thurman unit needed adjustment. If there was still something wrong, it was sometimes easier to diagnose after the cleaning and reseating.

What Weet said, plus a drop of Stabilant applied on a q-tip to the contacts.
http://www.stabilant.com/sizes.html

Also, never turn off a running PC unnecessarily - modern low/no lead solder connections hate warming and cooling cycles. All my PCs that died I recent years did so after being turned off.

Sounds like the power supply.

Pull power supply out of computer.

Do this.

If the power supply doesn't work after that test, it's bad.

I have a Dell that's of even older vintage. It's on its third power supply, I think.

+1 on what Dennis said of not turning them off unless you need to. Also, if you don't already have one, get a UPS.

Is your PC a desktop or laptop? Does it beep or make any other sounds while trying to start-up? If it beeps, count the number of beeps and let us know, along with the Dell model number. Can you boot off a bootable CD or DVD? Sometimes hard drive failures exhibit the same symptoms you're describing, especially if the BIOS is set to shut down if no bootable drives/devices are found.

If you have a desktop computer, it'll be much easier to pull and re-seat your device connections, than if you have a laptop. Can you hear your hard drive spinning up when you turn the machine on? Can you boot off a floppy or CD, and if it can, does the machine stay on instead of shutting down?

Doing restarts just fine might be due to your hard drive already spinning when you restart.

PLEASE tell us you have your data backed-up!!

Post script: bad power supply. The machine is now operational.

Good to hear that you are up and running. Other than one bad video card, every PC failure I've had was a power supply or hard drive.

Cobar wrote:Good to hear that you are up and running. Other than one bad video card, every PC failure I've had was a power supply or hard drive.

Pretty much the same here.

Darrell wrote:Post script: bad power supply. The machine is now operational.

Good. Did you test it or anything?