computer won't power up w/o removing cmos battery

[ARuddick]

I've got a desktop that I replaced the hd, cdr, and put an old video
card in a pci slot. The agp card I had was showing vertical lines
& rectangles, so I replaced it w/an old card from another machine.
Now, my machine won't start up unless I take out the lithium battery
EVERY time. Winxppro is on it and once it starts, it does fine. After
win. shuts it down it won't start up again w/o removing the battery.
I've unplugged everything one at a time & tried to see if I could
get power, but no results. It also will not shut down simply by
pressing the front pwr button or start up. The reset button works,
but that's all. I put the old video card back in just to see if I got
pwr w/it & nothing changed. When it does start back up it says
the cmos battery is low, but I just put in a brand new one to be safe.
It's an intel desktop mb, p4 1.6ghz, ati 3D rage II + pci video card,
300w pwr supply. I also added a zip drive. Any ideas on what could be
happening? :roll:

 

[Gareth Tuckwell]

I've got a desktop that I replaced the hd, cdr, and put an old video
card in a pci slot. The agp card I had was showing vertical lines
& rectangles, so I replaced it w/an old card from another machine.
Now, my machine won't start up unless I take out the lithium battery
EVERY time. Winxppro is on it and once it starts, it does fine. After
win. shuts it down it won't start up again w/o removing the battery.
I've unplugged everything one at a time & tried to see if I could
get power, but no results. It also will not shut down simply by
pressing the front pwr button or start up. The reset button works,
but that's all. I put the old video card back in just to see if I got
pwr w/it & nothing changed. When it does start back up it says
the cmos battery is low, but I just put in a brand new one to be safe.
It's an intel desktop mb, p4 1.6ghz, ati 3D rage II + pci video card,
300w pwr supply. I also added a zip drive. Any ideas on what could be
happening? :roll:

Check the startup video option in the BIOS - perhaps it is defaulting to AGP
or PCI (the wrong one). This tells the computer whether to look in the AGP
slot or the PCI slot for its graphics card. Perhaps windows is changing this
value - just set it yourself in the BIOS, reboot and check it is the same.