talkmagic.co.uk

Hope someone techy can help with my problem here, I've had a few computer problems solved on this forum, which is a useful second-feature.

OK,
so i press the on button on my PC and i get just the led light, no fans, no hard disk - when i look inside the fans just give a whirr, then die.

so I have a power supply tester,
and i plugged in the 24 pin motherboard connector and the 4 pin motherboard connector and from on the unit, on the 4 pin connector it has
+12v
+3.3v
+5v

(only +12v lights up)

on the 24 pin connector, it has
+3.3v
-12v
PG
+5VSB
+12v
-5v
+5v
(all light up except the -5v)

interestingly when the power supply tester is plugged in, the hard disk begins to whirr, but the fans remain dead.

Do i need a new PSU, some new wires, a new motherboard, or a whole new computer?
or can I fix it.
Thanks.
Ed.

Do you get the "Post" beep from the motherboard?

It sounds like a bit of hardware has failed.
In order of likelyhood from the description:

-Motherboard
-Hard Drive
-Ram
-GPU
-PSU

I would try disconnecting the hard drives and seeing if it will let you into the post/bios, this is stored on the motherboard. If not I would then reconnect the hard drive and take out the RAM and see how far it goes towards booting up. Repeat again with the GPU.

I've seen this happen before normally, its the transistors on the mobo dying (they have a limited life span in use). Often if the PSU is dying it will start letting out a high pitch squeal that you will be able to hear if you put your head near the back of the PC.

My gut feeling is the mobo has shuffled off its mortal coil, ceased to be etc...

If you have to replace the mobo, you'll need to find one that supports all your hardware(I hope you haven't got a dell in this case).

Then you'll need to reformat it to get it running, if you need to recover files download and burn an Ubuntu disc(Ubuntu is a linux operating system). Boot from this disc after you've put in your new motherboard you can then get all your old files and transfer them to your media of choice before wiping/reformatting your machine.

Check out the components as I described and update us.

It looks like the 5 volt voltage regulators are borked. Take it to a local computer shop (an independent one that other people recommend, not PC World, who are useless and will try to sell you things) and explain.

SmallHands - yowch, I wouldn't start suggesting swapping out the motherboard and reformatting until the problem's fully diagnosed.

That was an "if you have to" bit of advice about recovering files. I did suggest trying to pin point the problem first. I've seen two PC's do As described one was the mobo the other was a ridiculous Hard Drive set up. When PSU's go in my experience they fry most components and the computer becomes a big fancy looking brick.

Yes, you did, not sure why I didn't see that. Sorry!

user24 wrote:Yes, you did, not sure why I didn't see that. Sorry!

I've been working on my misdirection

it works very well!