I would agree that it sounds like the power supply. As far as the building wiring , you can buy ground fault detectors at the hardware store.
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power pc on, nothing seen on the display. rebooting the pc 3 times it works: why?
something very strange happend.
a pc which i used already about 4 years without any problems is now used by a friend of mine.
he changed the monitor to a lcd flat monitor, the mouse to a usb mouse (mircosoft - 4 years old) and exchanged the keyboard to a new ps2 keayboad (was ps2 before, too).
now when turning the pc on he can't see anything on the monitor.
the red light of themouse is turned off.
normally you'd expect some bios messages and so on .
he (not an expert at all) waited about 10 minutes and then pressed the turn-off button.
he can't power it down because the screen is still black.
doing this about 2 undtil max. 4 times the monitor , and the mouse and the keyboard will will work.
(= restarting it 2 undtil 4 times , the pc works fine)
if the pc runs fine he can restart it and has no problems.
just to mention:
when i worked with my "old" ibm monitor, ps2 mouse&keyboard i had no problems at all like these.
my friend live too far away to just swith these devices.
he also doesn't own extra hardware.
any idea what he could do to improve this situation and solve this problem?
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Answers
>> he can't power it down because the screen is still black. << Yes you can : hold the power button for 6 sec, it will power off.
As to why it happened, the system could have had trouble loading the necessary drivers.
since it is an older sytem, i would inspect the mobo for bad capacitors :
www.badcaps.net
hi,
we'll give it a try connecting all power cable directly to the wall.
when setting this pc up at my home it was not connected directly and worked fine.
it worked also fine when using it the years before also without connecting it directly to the wall.
regarding drivers:
i think that can not be the problem because (except the bios and so on) nothing is needed to display the pc startup information (like ram, which hdu is installed etc.).
regaring power down:
this is a good information on top.
thanks we'll try it. i guess that the behaviour (how it should work when holding this button) needs to be consigured in the powersettings of the control panle.
One of the big causes of things like this is bad capactors either in the power supply or on the motherboard itself.
(Occationally on a video card or in a monitor.)
www.badcaps.net/ident
.
hi,
some test are done and my friend told me this:
- he could connect the pc to the wall directly
- the monitor could not be connected directly due to a too long distance.
the behaviour did not change.
the he tested this:
inserting a floppy disk without any os.
turning the pc on
the os could not start from the floppy (ok ofcourse)
wait 10 minutes
do 1 reboot (pull out the floppy and reboot)
it works directly
any idea what's the problem here?
..just to mention it again: i never ever had this kind of problem using other monitor and mouse (like described before).
Either give the points to those you think helped best, or as in Community support for a refund like explained in the Link I posted above.
http://www.experts-exchang
thanks,
rindi,
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by: compfixer101Posted on 2007-02-20 at 09:57:13ID: 18572393
If the PC is plugged into ANY type of power strip try plugging it DIRECTLY into the wall, It could also be a failing PowerSupply, Or could be a bad power source overall. I would suggest trying to plug it directly into the wall, then try another Location to plug it into, then change out the PSU with one of equal or Greater power(I would suggest a more powerful PSU), If it still fails to boot right, try testing the PC at another Building overall to make sure that the buildings power source isn't faulty.
HTH
cf101