Computer help

[AggieJustin]

A friend of mine has computer problems... .



She's got a Dell desktop machine that won't start up. When you power it up, it will not boot up. There is power to the machine. You can see the power indicator lit up, the CD/DVD drives have power since they spin briefly when first turned on and the monitor will flicker when the computer is turned on.



It never appears to try to spin the hard drive or checks the floppy drive for a boot disk.



Any ideas what might be the problem? It is plugged into a surge protector, but it's also has the phone line connected 24/7. Is it possible that lightning/power surge through the phone line could have killed it?



Thanks,



JM

 

[TomGolden]

I have seen very similar symptoms when the power supply is hosed. Because there is a brief moment when things light up, and/or spin up as you have described, just like in new cars if the battery is too low to crank the starter but it does have enough juice to run the radio, cab lights, etc...



So the power supply might be toast.

 

[Doc Tinker]

I have replaced two motherboards in the last month in machines that had the same symptoms as your friend's Dell. You can test the system to make sure that it's not something else by unplugging all of the drives and removing all cards except the video adapter. If you still can't even get a bios startup screen, then it's probably a fried chip on the motherboard.



The motherboard for the Dell is probably proprietary, meaning it's made to fit the Dell case and generic boards from CompUSA or Best Buy won't fit it. If the machine isn't under warranty, have your friend try to get her insurance company to replace it.





Doc



PS - It's possible that the power supply is bad too, as Tom said. With my experience with the two last month, it wasn't the case.