Why does my system hate cold booting?

Caged

Caged

Caged

Man of Honour
Joined
18 Oct 2002
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This is really starting to annoy me now, and has been getting gradually worse over the past few months – time to find a fix (hopefully) :)

I have a Dell Inspiron 530 that I got cheap (yeah I know, not a great start, sorry!), which I put an ATi 4670 (512MB, Sapphire) in. All was fine and dandy for about 8 months, and then I started running into the issue. The problem is that I hit the power button and the system spins the fans up to full whack, then either sits like this forever, or powers down after about 10 seconds or so. Flipping the switch on the PSU and trying again may get it to spring to life after 15 attempts or so.

At first I thought it was the standard Dell PSU that was in the box, so I swapped it for a 330W Tagan I had knocking about, which didn't seem to make any difference.

Once the thing is running it's as close to 100% stable as it's possible to get – I can have sustained Call of Duty sessions, rag the CPU with video encoding etc, and it doesn't miss a beat. However once it powers down or hibernates then it just will not start again reliably. Rebooting always works (I guess since it doesn't power down fully).

Does anyone have a clue what this might be? Windows never gets a chance to put anything in the event log and there's no diagnostic LEDs on the board.
 
I had a very similar problems on an old s939 system.

Ran a 3200 and 2gb mismatched ram perfectly, upgraded to a 3800x2 and all the problems started.

Turns out it was 1 of the ram sticks causing everything, still cant work out why though :confused:
 
Cant remember sorry :(

Both sticks were perfectly fine but there was some incompatability with the new cpu.

*edit* But I had the same problems as you, would boot for a few secs then stay off, had to keep turning the psu switch on and off constantly.


Perhaps one of your sticks is dying? Try running one at a time.
 
Are you running a surge protector? Might be worth trying it without if you are as a few other people have had issues with cold boots and SP's
 
Caged said:
This is really starting to annoy me now, and has been getting gradually worse over the past few months – time to find a fix (hopefully) :)

I have a Dell....
Click to expand...


That's where I've stopped reading.
The best way to fix dell PCs is to get rid of them and build something proper : ).
 
Well thanks for your help I guess.

I'm trying the memory at the moment, seems to be working so either it doesn't like the stick, the slot, or just running 4 at once.

Not running a surge protector, never really bothered. Will try the CMOS battery after the RAM.
 
could be something as irritating as a bad connection.. somewhere, either cpu or ram or addon card or hdd might have an intermittent electrical connection that settles down when warm... could be a dry solder joint if your really unlucky,


also check for bulging caps on all AIC's and the motherboard itself.
 
I had an issue with this on a system i bought just a few weeks a go. I think it was a mother board issue, but as yours is a dell, maybe something else.

Did you put the old graphics card back in and see if it boots up ok with that?

I am still waiting to hear if mine was fixed, wasnt happy about sending it back though.

ColiNfr, let us know if you find the solution!
 
RAM turned out to be a red herring, started misbehaving again. Took the video card out and still having problems.

Next step is to unplug everything that isn't the motherboard and see what happens.
 
I would swap the hard disk, as strange as it sounds.

Had the same issue with a Dell 740. Once it booted up it was solid as a rock.

The disk was somehow causing the system to halt
 
Well it's struggling with the board, CPU and one stick of RAM running on a sheet of cardboard outside the case :p

Think it's dead.
 
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