PCTech Forums

I recently had minor surgery which kept me away from home for a few days. I thought i had turned my computer off, but when I returned home, it seemed to be in power saving sleep mode (Screen turned off, orange light on the tower. However when I tried to get it to react, I got no response. I tried turning it off and ten back on, but when it looked like it was powering up like normal, it suddenly went back to the hibernated state without ever turning the monitor on. Did my computer kill itself while I was gone?

Hey josh10581

Can you boot into Safe Mode or boot into the BIOS?

I tried booting to safe mode and DOS, as far as I can tell it didnt work. The monitor still didn't turn on. And when I booted up, the green light came on for maybe 1 minute, and then back to the orange stand bye light.

I can't try a different monitor as of yet, however I did try booting to bios. Once again I got no response from pressing the key, but I listened for fans and beeps. The only thing I heard was the hard drive. I mad my case completely open so I wouldnt miss any of the quieter sounds, and I can gurantee without a doubt that the fans were not spinning.

Which fans were not spinning? Im betting your power supply has gone bad or the cpu fan may have quit and fried the cpu?
When you try to boot look behind the case at the power supply fan to see if its spinning and also check the cpu fan.

None of my fans are spinning. Actually I was looking a little more closely, and i dont even have a real processor fan because my computer is pretty old. Just a fan blowing across the heat sink. But neither that fan or my power supply fan is working.

Hiya josh10581

Ok, you now know your power supply fan is not spinning. The fan on the heatsink, is it spinning? Is there one that sits on top the cpu?

Hmm where to go from here. There could be many reason for what happened.
I hate to tell you to start buying new devices and trying them and running you into a huge repair bill but its always a process of elimination.
What Im thinking is, first get a new power supply. If the power supplies fan does not spin after installing then I would have to say your motherboard has gone but then again you say you can hear your h.d.d.. So that means you are getting power to the board....but how...

What I would do would replace the power supply.
Take the advise or chose your own route to go, Im not sure how much you want to put into an older machine, it may be cheaper to buy a new pc.


I hope I have been some help

Im confusing myself....... its a hard call to make in my opinion

I was thinking that the power supply might be the answer to the problem. I'll see what I can do and if I get results I'll post them here. Thanks for your help.

I gave my computer to a techy friend to mess with, and he tried a new power supply to no avail. So I am gonna throw a couple of things and see if any of them stick. First, i will go with what he suggested. He doubted that it was the motherboard or the power supply, but seemed to think that the video card was responsible (my motherboard does not have a built in VC). And my dad suggested that the hard drive might be responsible. Let me know if either of these sound reasonable. Thanks in advance

Well we ruled out pretty much everything else didn't we? Power supply, Monitor.... dont rule out the cpu just yet or the memory. Hope you have some spare parts to throw around to try.
Let us know, will be interesting

Your welcome in advanced

Generally speaking, if the video card is bad you should get some beeps on bootup which indicate as such. From what you've said, I would say it really has to be motherboard/CPU or power supply. If the PSU fans aren't spinning then there really is no power (however it is odd that the hard drive has power). If you have no power this is either because the PSU has gone, something it is connected to is preventing it running properly (the motherboard) or maybe, the switch to turn it on isn't working properly.

The only other time I've seen an odd thing with PSUs was when a motherboard hadn't been seated properly in the case & was grounding the power to the case.

I know this is an old forum, but I wanted to update things a little bit because my computer is still not working. I replaced the power supply via a new case, replaced the videocard and motherboard via a new MOBO with onboard video, and replaced my processor. It still does the same thing. Only difference is that my fans do spin now. The only original pieces of hardware left from the first computer is the monitor (not the problem), the dvd-rom, dvd-burner, and my hard drive. Is it even reasonable to blame anything else at this point except the hard drive, or is that even plausible? Any posts are welcome, even if not completely the answer. Thanks in advance.

I am not completely sure, however I do remember that it was nearly double the size of my old power supply (200W) and I the number 350 sticks in my head. So I'll go with that as my final answer.