Compaq Presario 7000 Troubleshooting Help

[CW]

A friend of mine gave me the above 7000 to work on. It is an ATX design with
an Athlon 900MHZ CPU. It will not boot! On power-up, there is no video, but
the hard drive and CD-ROM drive go through their power on sequence and halt.
I removed both IDE cables, floppy cable, and all cards except the AGP video
card--nothing on power up. I also tried replacing the AGP video card with an
old PCI video card with no joy. FWIW, I checked the PS with a DMM and the
voltages are correct. It has two sticks of 128MB DIMM RAM, so I removed them
and rotated them in the first slot and tried to power up--nada. The CPU does
not get hot at all, so I am wondering if it is even working. The heatsink
and fan were pretty caked up with dust and grime, so I used compressed air
to clean them. The CPU and system fans seem to operate properly. Does anyone
have any ideas on what could be wrong?

 

[Dave]

A friend of mine gave me the above 7000 to work on. It is an ATX design
with an Athlon 900MHZ CPU. It will not boot! On power-up, there is no
video, but the hard drive and CD-ROM drive go through their power on
sequence and halt. I removed both IDE cables, floppy cable, and all cards
except the AGP video card--nothing on power up. I also tried replacing the
AGP video card with an old PCI video card with no joy. FWIW, I checked the
PS with a DMM and the voltages are correct. It has two sticks of 128MB DIMM
RAM, so I removed them and rotated them in the first slot and tried to
power up--nada. The CPU does not get hot at all, so I am wondering if it is
even working. The heatsink and fan were pretty caked up with dust and
grime, so I used compressed air to clean them. The CPU and system fans seem
to operate properly. Does anyone have any ideas on what could be wrong?

You've already narrowed it down to power supply, CPU or motherboard. What
you've got is that the CPU is not running POST. This could be caused by a
bad power supply, a bad CPU or a bad motherboard. A power supply can be bad
and test GOOD with a DMM. However, the symptoms caused by a bad power
supply with good voltage out are not what you are seeing. Most likely, you
are looking at a bad motherboard or CPU, with the motherboard being the more
likely suspect.

My advice is, don't spend any money trying to get this system to work. If
you can find an exact replacement mainboard off ebay for about ten bucks,
you might try that. Any more than that, and it won't be worth the
ffort. -Dave

 

[calvarygeorge]

I had the exact same problems with a cousin system (my system was Athon
1.333)... when I had my system, it was still under warranty so I got a
new processor and it solved the booting up problem but the system would
halt after it booted up --- Compaq then sent me new RAM and it solved
the problem... it seems that my processor & RAM went bad at the same
time (could have been a voltage hit)... your symptoms are exactly what
I went through until I had a new processor & RAM in it... hope it
helps...