PC won't start

At work they bought Dells thin line I think, anyway almost every one has failed.. Dell has extended the warranty . If yours is less tan 2 years old I would check.. If I remember correctly the problem is caps on the main board were bad.. Look at the the capacitors for bulging or leakage on the board.

About the only thing left is the motherboard itself. These power supplies are fairly sensitive to overload, and will shut themselves down, which might be what you are seeing happening when the lights dim.

In the last couple of years, there was an issue with ' fake ' electrolytic capacitors which had been purchased by a number of far east MB manufacturers, and incorporated into their products. These started to fail in fairly short order, but some kept going for quite some time. As I recall, the ones which gave most trouble, were all located physically around the CPU chip, and you could see the tops of them bulging when they went bad.

Might be way off beam here, and there's probably others on here who might be able to better advise you, but that's my two penn'orth anyway, for what it's worth.

Arfa

You don't say how old it is, but some years ago (around the PII era IIRC) Dell were much criticised for switching the pinouts around on their power supplies and motherboards, so you had to buy their exact replacements. Fitting a standard ATX power supply was seemingly straightforward as there was no obvious clue they were different, but as soon as it wss powered on, there was catastrophic failure of the motherboard and/or the power supply, or if one was lucky the power supply would just shut down before any damage was done. I'd check the Dell power supply is indeed a standard type, which it will be if it's fairly recent.

Dave

One other thing to try if it's a model that has one, is the riser board. I used to have to support a site that had a bunch of Optiplex GX1's and about half of them wouldn't power up with their riser boards in 'em after a year or so. A documented Dell defect... Pull the riser if it's got one and see if it fires up.

it's a fairly new machine; probably just 2 years. Thinking P4 2.3ghz or thereabouts.

What a disaster.

Arfa's comments about the PS overloading and shutting down seem to fit what I am seeing with the lights, but I have carefully inspected all the capacitors and there doesn't seem to be any visable evidence. Also, it's a dimension desktop and erverything I read about the capacitor problems are on Optiplex MBs.

Not quite sure what is next; probably a $30 charge to get it looked at by one of the local shops.

Thx for the info,

"Dave D" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@pipex.net:

"Kevin S." wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:

Its a Dimension 4600.

Sorry, should have added that to my earlier post.

Cheers,

Hi...

If it hasn't already been suggested one thing you might want to try is pulling out cards one by one - ie pull the video card, see if there's any (lights) difference when you try to start it. Do the same with network card, sound card, and so on. Perhaps one of them is faulty.

Maybe even try the same trick with the floppy and cd etc power connectors.

Take care.

Ken

Jill: Gosh..... for just $30..... take it to the shop and stop guessing and worrying. electricitym

Jill--

I had a similiar problem with an older 1.4G unit. After some experimentation discoverved that if I held a hair blower on high cool at the back of the power supply and spun up the fan for a few seconds, then attempted to boot the computer the unit would start--but the hair blower couldn't be shutoff until the total boot sequence was complete. Once the unit was up and running the hair dryer could be removed and the unit worked fine until shutdown. Then get out the hair dryer--finally bought new computer.

Good luck

Tut