Good day all,
I’ve having a very peculiar hardware problem and I wonder if someone might be able to help.
I have a Dell Dimension 3000 (circa early 2006) running Windows XP Home. Yesterday when I booted it up I got the Dell Bios screen and then nothing but a flashing cursor at the top left hand corner of the screen. After cursing profusely, I started tinkering with connectors and such to no avail. After a couple of hours of that not working I pulled all of the peripherals off of the back with the exception of video and booted and didn’t it boot up to the Windows login screen! I tried to plug my mouse back in but it appears that all but one of the USB ports on the back don’t work and that didn’t seem to respond. Has anyone ever seen something like this before???
When this all started happening I thought the hard drive might have died but the fact that it will boot up under certain conditions leads me to believe the HDD is still living. At this point I’m thinking that I might be looking at a bad motherboard or power supply. Are those reasonable assumptions? I looked up at the specs online and the darn thing only has a 250W PSU in it.
Any help or tips are greatly appreciated!
Welcome to hardware forums dotnetcowboy! 
have you tried reseting your bios with the clear CMOS jumper on your motherboard?
Thanks for the welcome and reply Impotence.
Although I’ve got quite a lot of experience with software, hardware still mystifies me somewhat. Where would that jumper be located? How would I go about using it? Are there any dangers to performing such an operation?
this should not be dangerous in any way (for you or your computer), although for good measure you should wear an anti-static wrist strap if you have one, also, leave the case plugged in but MAKE SURE it is turned off at the wall… this means that the case is grounded [and so are you if your touching it/attached to it, so no static!]
if you have your motherboard manual you it should be mentioned in there.
what you looking for is a jumper (like the ones you use to set master on slave on DVD drives etc) on a row of 3 pins. EXAMPLES
some newer motherboards have a clear CMOS button
They are normally somewhere near the small round battery on your motherboard
[OT]
CMOS stands for “Complimentary Memory On System”, it is where the BIOS saves its settings… when you clear this bit of memory the bios has to go back to its default settings (even if you haven’t changed anything, doing this seems to solve quite a few problems).
you will have to set the clock when you have done this, as it will forget and think that its somewhere around 2001! (normally).
[/OT]
Thanks Impotence. Your help is greatly appreciated.
So if it is a jumper, I just move it from one position to another and back? And if its a button I just push the button?
you got it 
[OT]
Good luck, i won’t be on hwf until tonight, if your still having problems hopefully someone else will know the answer (different people appear on this forum at different times due to the fact where al spread around the world and work/sleep at different times!)
[/OT]
I’ve read through the Dell documentation and all I can find a reference to is a “Password Reset Jumper” on the motherboard. Would this be the same thing?
Most likely, if I’m reading the same manual as you though (this one) it really isn’t that useful!
However, there is another way to do it that works on most motherboards! make sure the computer is turned off at the wall and then remove the battery on your motherboard (handle it as little as possible) and leave it on a plastic or paper surface for a minute or two.
Hopefully, this will clear the CMOS (as most need that battery to store anything), however, some newer motherboards seem to use non-volitile storage (does not lose data when it loses power) for there BIOS settings but its worth a shot.
Okay, now its just getting weird.
Messing around again and plugged an old PS/2 keyboard into the connector at the back of the computer for kicks and didn’t the darn thing boot up and work properly! I went into the Bios setup and read the error log. It seems the POST was detecting a keyboard failure and this, for some reason, was stopping the boot sequence!
So it appears that my keyboard is dead and the USB ports on the rear of my computer are dead but the two USB ports on the front of the computer are functional. Does this change the ball game any? Is it possible that the USB ports on the back of the computer are dead but the ones on the front aren’t?