PC Will Not Power Up

[Brigadier]

An older PC of mine recently started to display the following symptoms
after working flawlessly for many years:

- PC stopped responding to the spacebar startup despite it being
configured in the BIOS, having done so for years, and us not changing
the shutdown procedure (always a Win XP shutdown). The only way to
start it was to press the front panel power button.
- Two weeks later, pressing the power button stopped working too
unless the power supply switch on the back was cycled off and on. At
first, there was a brief flash of the power and hard disk activity
lights but now there is no such indication. PC still boots after
this.

Is this likely a motherboard or a power supply problem?

TIA,

Dallen

Athlon 1.2GHz, 640MB SDRAM, ASUS A7?266 MB, WinXP SP2

 

[ASI Industries]

This system is a good candidate for bad capacitors on mainboard or and psu.

Bad caps
http://www.badcaps.net

 

[DaveW]

It mainly sounds like a PSU failure, but the only way to make sure that it
isn't also/or a motherboard problem is to replace the PSU with a good known
working one.

 

[Brigadier]

Thanks. I guess I have a couple of options: 1 - Replace the six-year-
old machine in its entirety, or 2 - try this approach.

If I chose the former (since I don't have another power supply), I
need to replace the PS, MB, RAM and CPU. I can salvage the case, NIC,
HDs, video card, sound card, and DVD burner. Never having done this
before, is this going to be much of a problem?

 

[Ed M.]

Thanks. I guess I have a couple of options: 1 - Replace the six-year-
old machine in its entirety, or 2 - try this approach.

If I chose the former (since I don't have another power supply), I
need to replace the PS, MB, RAM and CPU. I can salvage the case, NIC,
HDs, video card, sound card, and DVD burner. Never having done this
before, is this going to be much of a problem?

It shouldn't be all that difficult. Just take your time and you should be
fine. At six years old, your system is pretty much out of date unless all
you do is word processing, email and browsing. You might have a problem
using your present video card as a lot of the later MBs don't have AGP slots
anymore. A basic PCI-E video card can be purchased well under $100.00US
unless your do some heavy gaming and then you can more than double that cost
for a decent, middle of the road card. Most heavier gamers are using the
Nvidia 8800 series cards that can be priced from the mid-$300s up to $700+.

Ed

 

[Brigadier]

It shouldn't be all that difficult. Just take your time and you should be
fine. At six years old, your system is pretty much out of date unless all
you do is word processing, email and browsing. You might have a problem
using your present video card as a lot of the later MBs don't have AGP slots
anymore. A basic PCI-E video card can be purchased well under $100.00US
unless your do some heavy gaming and then you can more than double that cost
for a decent, middle of the road card. Most heavier gamers are using the
Nvidia 8800 series cards that can be priced from the mid-$300s up to $700+.

Ed

Thanks, all. Power supply replaced easily and the systems is stable.
No MB problems so far.

DJM