Quote:
Originally Posted by Por_sha911
TY - very informative. My XP PS crapped out 10+ years ago and I replaced it with one from New Egg. Never had a problem. The pin thing did concern me since the plug into the motherboard has more pin than what the above pic show.
The more I look into it, the more I believe something when wonky with the bios. I am not skilled with doing things suggested. I have a PIII that ran ME in the closet. If I can get it to fire up I may just go stone age and use it for the couple programs that I can't get to work with Win11 (I get an error message that missing components - maybe a driver or a DLL) and when I tried to install on program the laptop wouldn't run so I has to use SecureKey to get it back and then use a restore point (whew).
I guess I can't say I didn't see this coming. I've backed up (zero data was lost  )and prepared as much as I could for the eventuality of having to give up XP. I wish I could buy a NOS XP or Win 7 machine. |
Y'know, you've carefully avoided mentioning even what model of Dell this is.
And you describe the front button/LED behavior,
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Por_sha911
]the power to the power supply was on but the power light on the back was out - I unplugged the power cable going into the PS and when I plugged it back in the light came on BUT when I pushed the power button in the front, the light went out!
If I hold the button for 3 secs the light in the back at the PS comes on. Hold it again it goes out and then light comes back on but the computer doesn't fire (and the power button in the front doesn't light up either time)
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This behavior(light on thr back going out when you press the front button) seems to be part of Dell's BIST - try googling "dell hold the button for 3 secs the light in the back at the PS comes on" and read the explanation there.
A quick skim through that (an AI slop summary, probably mixed up from a dozen models) makes me think that could indicate the motherboard may not be working correctly. And you're not going to get far without that.
Good news is that a replacement motherboard for a machine that old will probably run you more for postage than the part itself on Flea Bay.
Bad news is that swapping parts randomly without any idea what's wrong is just as poor an approach for computers as it is for cars....
You should probably first:
a) Read the diagnostics in Dell's manual for that specific model. Some have diagnostic LEDs on the motherboard, and blink-codes for error states that may indicate what's wrong.
b) Go through the time-honored "reseat everything", "remove everything you can", "rotate DIMM positions/remove all unnecessary sticks" etc dance to see if you can get it booting to BIOS beofre adding stuff back to see what kills it.
Seems unlikely to me that the BIOS is at fault. They're held in non-volatile storage and don't evaporate. Even if you lose the transient settings in CMOS because the battery (usually a CR20xx, like a 2032 or 2035) that keeps those alive (and also drives the RTC when the computer is switched off), the BIOS will just (typically) revert to default settings and prompt you to set the date/time on every boot.
As the machine isn't booting - or even giving you boot error beep codes - seems to me that you're not even getting as far as the BIOS being involved.