Nearly dead PC - No POST

I'm looking at a friend's PC for them, they can't afford to replace the whole unit so that's not an option here. I'm completely out of ideas, so any suggestions are gratefully received.

The machine is an old Tiny TI440BXM, the original symptoms were that when the power cable was attached, it would only occasionally boot up. No H/W changes had been made to the machine, the symptoms just developed.

Usually the power and HDD lights would come on, and stay on, but nothing else. No POST, no beeps. The PSU and CPU fans would run - sometimes for a second, sometimes continuously but there's no video display or audible HDD activity. You could kill the power completely by holding in the power switch, but it wouldn't switch on that way - you had to remove and replace the power plug.

I did a standard check for solid connections, cleared the CMOS, tried a different PSU and this made no difference.

Next I removed the IDE cables from the MOBO, and the power cables from the CD-R, CD-RW and HDD - the only difference was that the HDD light didn't come on any more.

I got a brand new MOBO dirt cheap from e-Bay, it's a slightly different model with 2 COM ports instead of 1 COM and 1 GRAPHICS, but I'm guessing it's fundamentally the same. I've put my old GEFORCE 2 MX-400 card in there for the purposes of testing, but the system still won't boot - you sometimes get a flash on the HDD/Power lights or a short spin of the fans, but nothing else.

I'm now guessing that the problem's with the CPU or the RAM, but I understand that with a RAM problem you'll usually get a POST beep code. I don't know much about CPUs, so in the spec below is exactly what's written on top of it when you remove the heatsink (as I had to when swapping MOBOs). The sink/CPU paste is old and dried up.

As the POST won't even come up with or without the HDD/CDs I haven't listed them, let me know if I should.

My next move is probably going to be to try to get a new CPU, any suggestions/comments. Am I wasting my time?

Cheers in advance for any help.

Les

PC SPEC:

MOBO: MS-6340 REV:1
RAM: 128Mb 100MHz PC100 SDRAM
CPU: AMD Athalon 800MHz (A0800AMT3B AFFA0041SPEW 931821700S)

 

Does the CPU heat up when you apply power to the mobo?

Do you have access to another PC100 RAM stick you can try?

If there are 2 (or more) RAM sticks in the mobo, try each one at a time and in different DIMM slots. If it boots at all you know you've got a bad stick or slot.

 

Have you checked the power supply? This sounds very much like a power supply issue to me... my friend had it with his new PC, he had to get a new PSU in order to make it even beep. If its an old machine the PSU has probably degraded a bit over that time in any case.

That would be my advice before you pull your hair out trying to diagnose a problem with the rest of the components

 

reset the bios, either by pulling out the battery for a couple of seconds or by changing a switch

 

goldy...

to me...it sounds like a cpu failure. i had a cpu failure a few months ago, and I didn't get any post code beeps either. replaced it and it booted up fine.

 

Doh, didnt see that bit! Yeah, the next thing i would suspect would be CPU, then ram (that usually gives beens though)

 

never mind, my bad.

 

Cheers for the advice guys, I'll borrow a stick of memory from work tomorrow and try that (the stuff I have at home isn't compatible) and I'm bidding for a secondhand CPU on eBay at the moment (all of £2!).

Thanks again for confirming my suspicions.

Les