weird problem; PSU issue?

weird problem

Hello all, my girlfriend has a co-worker with a broken comp, so she brings it to me to fix it, the problem is that it wont power on... at first i thought it was the power supply and i happened to have an extra one sitting arround, so i slap it in, and nothing, but i notice, that a light on the mother board is on, and when i press the power button the fans start to spin then stop, i changed out the ram, same problem, its an older comp so i dont have a processor to try out, i am thinking the mobo is trash, or theres a short in the wire to the power button, anyone have any suggestions ideas or long shot guesses that dont involve getting a new mother board?

thx in advance for any help.

 

Yeah, when I fried my motherboard, it was just like that. The comp would boot for like a second, fans would spin, etc., then it'd just shut off... then again, there are a lot of other things that could be causing something like that... If it's an old PC, it's probably not worth the trouble of trying to fix anyway, and when you can build a decent PC for under $500, it is a fairly good time to just buy a new one, and will probably be cheaper than buying "new" parts for the old computer...

 

yea thats what i was thinking, its a really old gateway comp, lol the old powersupply is only 90w lol and it only had 32mb of SDRam

 

Fans spin up, and lights kick on eh? Interesting. It might be as simple as a corrupt BIOS. Sometimes if the BIOS becomes corrupted it can cause the machine to start to load, but then the BIOS crashes when it reads the data out of the ROM. Unfortunately, when it reaches this point it's almost unsavable except with a motherboard transfer. Keep in mind if you swap the motherboard in an older computer youll have to get a motherboard with the proper power supply connections. For example, a P4 or newer athalon requires a special power connector to power the processor. If you purchase one of these motherboards and attempt to boot it without the correct power, it won't work.

 

yea im aware of that, my Gigabyte K7 Triton has that, in addition to the standard ATX hookup theres another one with 4 pins.

 

Before you buy a new MOBO, take out the CMOS battery and unplug the power supply let it sit for a few seconds and put the battery back in and try booting it. You never know if someone or something has changed the BIOS settings to make it unbootable (Memory timming, volatage or CPU settings). This wont hurt you computer in the least, it should reset all setting to default and if it boots you can set all the required settings. Bus speed and drive settings if need be.

PS: If you have a battery kicking around try replacing it, just in case.