HTPC Woes

[memyselfandi]

Well, I went to turn on my upstairs HTPC last night and nothing happened

System spec is as follows:
AMD 4450e Processor
Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H
2GB Corsair DDR2
1x 200GB Samsung disk
1x 500GB Samsung disk
20x Lite-on DVDRW
Antec Fusion Black HTPC Case (the older release with the 430W PSU included)
Vista HP (32bit)

I've had the system for ~6 months and it's been running ok apart from sometimes needing a few attempts to power on, i.e hit the power button and nothing happens but after a couple of attempts it comes on ... hit the button now and it does nothing at all, (button does seem to be clicking properly)..

The only sign of life is that when power is applied to the PSU the backlight on the cases front display comes on but trying to start the system results in nothing, no fan spinning, no disk power up noises, no POST.

I've not had much time to investigate yet but I've tried booting with no drives connected and that makes no difference. I'm going to try a different PSU at the weekend to see if that makes a difference but I was wondering if anyone had some thoughts on what could be causing this issue?

Current thoughts on approaching this are:
- try spare PSU
- try spare PSU and turning on system without using the case power button
- try other RAM / try RAM in other machine

(Not having another AM2 system does limit the testing on the motherboard and CPU I can do)

If it does turn out to be the PSU I'm thinking of going for a "Enermax Pro 82+ 425W EPR425AWT ATX2.3 Silent PSU", any thoughts on this?

Also does anyone know how easy it is to get at the back of the power switch on the FUsion case if it does turn out that that is at fault?

Cheers

 

[Royal Fleet]

I had a similar problem recently with a machine, that once running was fine, but became increasingly difficult to start up. With that one though the fans would spin, but would do nothing from there. Needed to replace the Mobo.

 

[memyselfandi]

Had a fiddle this evening. Would look like it's the power switch at fault as swapping the connections around a the motherboard end between the reset and power switches allows the system to be turned on normally by the reset switch.

Now just need to work out how to get the front off the case in order to investigate the switch issue.