PC won't start

My 4 year old studio PC- Murphy is sick,

about a month or two ago he started acting up. The PC had been turned off for the weekend and when I returned on Tuesday and turned him on the fan and lights came on for about 5 seconds and stopped. I turned the power on the case itself off and unhooked all of the components and reconnected them in a various number of patterns and ultimately disconnect the floppy drive and left it undone, removed from power and from the motherboard. Then again under a power failure the PC was off power for a day and when I returned I faced the same situation. This time I didn't have a floppy to blame or disconnect the floppy because it was already gone but with unhooking and hooking back up the hard drives, and cd and dvd drives Murphy started back up. Then today we had an extended power outage and I had the issue again but today after all the unhooking and re hooking the best I can get is an extended almost 20 seconds before it stops.


any ideas, before I declare Murphy a toaster and build a new machine?


thanks,
Wicked

 

Where do you live that has such unreliable power?!?! Power supplies have been known to fail after power outages, especially after numerous outages. You should check your motherboard also; look for any capacitors that might have bowed out tops. If any are even slightly popped up, the motherboard will need replacing. If you see any crud leaking out of the top of any capacitors you'll need to replace the mobo. Find the BIOS chip on the mobo. They usually have a foil sticker on 'em (not always tho'). If the foil sticker looks discolored or is not perfectly smooth (meaning: it has wrinkles or is peeling off), that means your BIOS chip is burnt, and a new mobo is needed. Hopefully, you or a friend has an extra power supply laying around that you can hook up to see if it's just your power supply that's died....

hd2k

 

thanks I will try that, don't know if i have a spare power supply around but i have a dead e machine I might be able to muck with.... will check everything you said. thanks



oh and I live in a tiny rural town in Indiana... with really wonky power.

 

The capacitors are pristine and the the bios chip is a perfect as the skin on a baby's behind... so I will pursue the powersupply next.

thanks