Computer will not respond to starting up

Hey there, long time member. let me give you my specs before I start off:
Motherboard - ASUS A8N-E 939 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra ATX AMD Motherboard

CPU - AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Manchester 2.2GHz Socket 939

PSU - FSP Group (Fortron Source) AX500-A ATX12V 500W Power Supply

RAM - CORSAIR XMS 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model TWINX2048-3200

Video Card - Negligable, I have a PCI and a PCI-E card that I switched around and are tip top when I was trying to fix this

This started two months ago after a friend of mine tried to install Diablo 2 onto my comp. Afterwards it would only start up but never get to the BIOS screen, I also noticed the the PCU's heatsink wouldn't spin up as fast as it used to. Time passed by and a week ago my friend tells me about reseting the bios by unplugging the comp, taking out the battery, and setting the jumper to 2&3 for 30 seconds, resetting the RAM and vid card and putting everythign back to normal, and it worked since it seemed that the one stick of RAM was dead.

I do a defrag and download some music off the net, go about my business. Well windows update somehow turned itself on to auto update and restart without me doing anything. I stopped it auto restarting but I end up doing it myself an hour later and thats when the comp wouldn't restart again and it sounded like the cpu fan was once again out of breath since it didn't do the initial speed up like it would for going into bios.

So I retry the bios restart trick and the reset trick to no avail. So he tells me that it might be that the motherboard is makign contact with the back metal plate, so I unplug everything take off the motherboard and everything looks fine so I put it back how it was, pulgs and all. Now it won't even start except once and thats b/c I kept hitting the power button out of frustration, it turned on alright but wouldn't turn off until I unplugged it. So I came to major's since I remember I had something similar happen but I forgot how to deal with it.

 

I’m assuming you no longer get the standard Beep from the internal speaker indicating that your system passed POST? If not then your machine didn’t make POST for one of many reasons. If it did Beep (single) ensure everything is connected correctly, use a VGA card you know to be good and try again and disable onboard if present. Try it on a different monitor again one you know to be working.

If the lights are on and no one is beeping… Check all internal and external connections jumper settings and power, reset, hdd led.. ect on the motherboard. Failing that… I might suspect it could be the PSU. It’s very possible that the PSU is dying or has already crocked it. How long have you had the machine? Do you get many or any electrical storms in your area and is your Tower Unit connect to a half decent surge protector (most UPS’ surge protectors don’t do much protecting!). If you have a spare PSU hook it up and try it! If you get power then you’ve found the problem most likely.

If your machine in a brand name Dell, Compaq or IBM and you haven’t added anything major or taken anything out e.g. like a motherboard then I wouldn’t normally suspect contact between the case and the board. If your machine was self constructed or a friend did it you might want to count how many screws and screw holes you have on your motherboard vs how many standoff’s or pins you have on the case. Simple answers is more standoffs than screws = possible contact.

If all else fails disconnect everything! Install a stick of RAM you know to be good, Video card, monitor and keyboard and start from there. Begin adding components one at a time until you find which one is causing the problem.

Good Luck and sorry for the long response!