Wot!! No Power

IanB001

IanB001

IanB001

Associate
Joined
21 Dec 2004
Posts
141
Location
Bristol, UK
Hiya

I've got an ageing computer that's worked well until today. One minute it was working fine and the next it wasn't. I believe the power supply has gone, but I'm concerned that modern, up to date, power supplies will not work with this dinosaur.

It has an Asus P4S533 motherboard with a P4 2.4Ghz processor and an HIS HD 3850 512MB 256bit DDR3 AGP graphics card. The old power supply is a Tagan 550W unit.

I'm assuming it's the power supply, as normally when I turn the power on by the power supply switch I hear some kind of life from the computer like a feint click, but now I hear nothing at all. It's completely dead. Yes, I've tried the fuse and cable :)

Any suggestions on a replacement PSU?

Thank you.

Ian.
 
Thank you, I shall take a look at that one. Will that provide sufficient power as my existing one is a 550W and this is only a 400W?

Cheers

Ian.
 
I've hooked up my nice new power supply now. A green light illuminates on the motherboard but when I hit the power button on the case absolutely nothing happens.

Any ideas what the problem may be?

Thank you.

Ian.
 
There were three direct connections to the motherboard:
  • ATX Power Supply Connector (20 pin)
  • ATX 12V Power Supplier Connecter (4 pin square)
  • ATX 12V1 Power Supply Connector (4 pin standard)
 
Common problem on PC's especially after a PSU failier is for complete corruption of the CMOS chip that stores all the PC's bios settings. Generally whats required to recover is remove the power cables from the PSU to motherboard, remove the battery, and place the cmos clear jumper in the "clear" position.

Then leave the PC, 30 minutes is a pretty safe bet (sometimes 5 minutes is ok, occasionally overnight... but on average 30 mins is 99.99% recovery).

Return jumper to the normal position, and reconnect power cables from PSU.

PC should now power on as normal, and tell you something like Bios settings corrupt, press F1 for setup or F2 for defaults.. whatever it asks, just pick the option for going to bios, and check everything is right, and save. PC will be fine from there.

This procedure will fix many "dead" PC's. If it doesnt, then something has been damaged and is preventing startup.
 
I've disconnected the power supply, removed the battery and put the jumper in the clear position.

I'll leave it for 24 hours now and try reconnecting everything tomorrow evening.

I got my fingers crossed.

Thank you.
 
Well, it looks like it's the end of the road for this old PC.

I put the jumper back, the battery back in and connected the power supply up again, flipped the PSU power switch, pushed the power switch on the case and ............... nothing.

There's a little green LED that illuminates on the motherboard but that's it.

I would have thought the fan in the PSU would have spun up, but absolutely nothing.

I'm out of ideas now.
 
Probably bad caps on the motherboard then, although its possible that its just the power switch, check its properly connected to the motherboard..

The fact it powered down while you were using it, would normally indicate something broke though unfortunatly. Might be bad caps, check all the caps near the cpu and memory, to see if any have bulged tops (they should be flat), or visible holes in them.

Try pulling the ram, and graphics card from the system, and see if it starts up with just the PSU/Motherboard/CPU. It should beep to indicate ram failure.. no beep then the cpu or motherboard is toasted.

Used parts can be handy to restoring older PC's on a shoestring budget, but it may be time to retire it to the PC graveyard.
 
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