Death of my PC

Illiciter

Premium Supporter
Apr 28, 2009
1,865
So my beasty PC has decided to stop turning on.


The motherboard is getting juice, and when I flick the switch for the power supply the lights dim so it's getting juice charged to it.. but when I press the power switch it just clicks - nothing turns on or starts up.


PC has been sitting unused for a few weeks, but other than that I can't see any reason why it would stop turning on? I had it hooked through a surge protector but it is rather old however the protection light was still on like it should be... Any ideas on a fix for this?

I'm thinking I'll have to pull everything out and give it a thorough cleaning throughout - my fear is the motherboard bit it somehow while it was sitting with juice attached to it.. maybe a power outage somehow damaged it although its unlikely...
 
errr... doesn't the 650 watt power supply on your PC cause the lights to flicker when you first switch it on? That's an awful lot of juice in the flip of a switch.

It shouldn't, Its those good ole Kansas houses, the old ones have horrid wiring..
 
haha no they don't. you don't get any beeps or anything tho?

any lights on the mobo?

i mean..it could be lots of stuff, dead ram, dead cpu, dead mobo...
 
It shouldn't, Its those good ole Kansas houses, the old ones have horrid wiring..


Er this one is only 30 years old so shouldn't be that bad, I think it's just because the lighting runs on the same circuit that the PC, Stereo, Kegerator, etc... is plugged in.

hehe
 
haha no they don't. you don't get any beeps or anything tho?

any lights on the mobo?

i mean..it could be lots of stuff, dead ram, dead cpu, dead mobo...



Yeah the power LED on the mobo does come on and indicates there is juice. I don't see how ram is going to prevent the boot up as on boot the bios will geek out and say, "wtf man"

Nothing extreme has occured to the PC in the few weeks it stayed powered off
 
got any spare parts laying around to do some testing? gotta be a dead mobo or a dead power supply

and what kind of computer are we talking here? custom built?
 
got any spare parts laying around to do some testing? gotta be a dead mobo or a dead power supply

and what kind of computer are we talking here? custom built?

Custom built, yes,


No beeps either, literally I push the power button and all you hear is the plastic switch click, no jolt of power or anything its like the connection from the switch to the lead wire isn't even connected.
 
Don't you hear your fans go on when you hit the switch? you can buy a 10 dollar PSU tester tool and you will know immediately if it's dead. I had this happened and it turned out to be the power switch :p I ended up rewiring
 
Custom built, yes,


No beeps either, literally I push the power button and all you hear is the plastic switch click, no jolt of power or anything its like the connection from the switch to the lead wire isn't even connected.

disconnect the power switch from the motherboard and touch the jumpers with something metal
 
Don't you hear your fans go on when you hit the switch? you can buy a 10 dollar PSU tester tool and you will know immediately if it's dead. I had this happened and it turned out to be the power switch :p I ended up rewiring


Nope, no fan noise.. literally it just clicks and nothing happens.. it would be akin to flipping the light switch and the lights don't come on.

I would say the PSU, HOWEVER, there is power being delivered to the MOBO from the power supply - while it's low power and doesn't require a fan, its still able to deliver juice.
 
disconnect the power switch from the motherboard and touch the jumpers with something metal

I'll give this a shot... What is confusing to me is nothing drastic happened to the machine other than just not being used for a few weeks.. wonder if a bug crawled in there and shorted something. Generally hardware doesn't just die unless dust or something caused a short...
 
You wouldn't believe what happened....


Went down to my puter and before doing anything I turned on the power, gave juice to the PSU, pushed the power, and.....



it worked!


???