PC died - any ideas?

jem16

My son's PC won't come on at all. When he presses the power switch everything lights up momentarily and then dies again.

He thinks it's the PSU. I think it's the motherboard.

Any other probable cause?

JamesUK_3

Depends on the computer.

Some will refuse to work blank out if they do not receive a connection to a motherboard, others will happily carry on regardless.

If your's doesn't care then you should at least have the psu fan spinning, hard drives spinning etc. when it gets turned on. If your pc DOES care, then it could boot quickly and even more quickly decide it has no motherboard connection and turn itself off again.

You could try un-plugging the psu from the motherboard and seeing if turning it on does anything?

rygon

Right there could be a whole world of thing that can go wrong. You have to eliminate them bit by bit. Read the motherboard manual. Is there any hints (ie beeps the pc makes normally tells whats wrong..or lights flashing in a certain way)
1st of all i would remove everything that is not necessary to the pc booting up. That means cd drives, floppy drives, hard drives, agp/pci etc cards and memory (only connection to the motherboard needs removing). The only thing you should have left is psu, motherboard proceesor (and graphics card if theres no onboard card). Turn it on now and see what happens (can you get into bios) if thats ok then install one thing at a time until it stops working (the last thing you put in is normally the damaged item).

My pc has just died as well. the psu had blown (switched on and fans would turn one rev then nothing) Bought a new 400W ATX 2.0 psu from maplins (£20) and it still doesnt work (everything sounds fine but monitor just diplays "no input". tested with 2 monitors and 2 graphics cards but still the same)

mima

In my case it was the PSU.
Probably the easier (and cheapest) part to check or replace.
Try one from another computer, if you have one.

jem16

Thanks for the ideas. Hopefully it will be the PSU as it's the easiest to replace and we have a spate to try. My son has gone out just now so will try later.

It's just the fact that he says everything inside the PC lights up but only for a few seconds then dies that makes me think it's not the PSU - hopefully I'm wrong.

iwanttosave_2

This happened to me the other week, all it was was the memory had come loose, after a panic for 4 hours, a simple push had it all back working as normal.