Okay, here's the story I have a Dell Dimension 4200 and I had 2 128 mb RAM cards installed. I got a free 512mb card and turned the computer off, unplugged all cables, and installed the card in place of one of the 128mb cards. It was working fine but the computer only read out as 512 mb. The next day I decided that maybe if I try the other 128mb card instead of the one already in, it would read both the 512 and 128 cards. Being stupid, I removed the 128mb card without shutting anything off. All was well until I picked up the other 128mb card and attempted to put that in. As soon as I touched the card to the slot, the computer shut off. After doing a few tests, I found out that I have power to both my CD and DVD drives, and my floppy drive. I also have power to my hard drive. There is unfortunatly no power to my ethernet card and I assume there is none to my sound card or mother board for that matter. Did I short something and blow a fuse in the PSU or did I just kill my mobo? Either way, any help would be appreciated and I have a lot of stuff on the hard drive, would it be a good idea to remove the hard drive and make copies of the info on my other computer? Thanks!
How do you know power is going to your rom drives etc? Are you press the power button and then pressing eject? If this is so then power must still be flowing through your motherboard, no blown fuses (there aren't any) or diodes. I take it there are no beeps or anything displayed on your screen? Id try and get into BIOS first. You might as well disconnect your drives and PCI cards etc. If there arent beeps then its I doubt you'll get into BIOS. You wont even be able to flash your BIOS if it isnt passing POST. I wouldnt be surprised if its dead for good. Hot Plugging non "hot plugable" hardware is definatly a daft thing to do, at least I know I dont need to sacrifice an old 486 to see what happens now!
The monitor light doesnt go from orange to green like it normally does. I dont hear any beeps and there seems to be the normal humming made by the computer when it starts up, unfortunately, that humming stops after a while. I know the drives work because they all eject and have lights. I know the hard drive works because when I hold it and turn the power on, I can feel the head spinning and there is a slight humming like normal. Please tell me what I can do to just get my computer running again
yeah, back to your problem, it sounds to me that you´ve fried your PSU and your 128Mb of RAM you removed without turning off the power get a new PSU and remove the 128Mb you removed without turning off the power and see what happens, mobo is probably fine BTW if you dont have an anti static strap, touch an exposed metal part of the case every minute or so (to avoid static damage while playing inside your case)
NO u dont need a new psu. ur psu is perfectly fine and the ram has nothing to do with frying the psu. (althoug there cud be a slight slight chance but higly unlikely) u mobo has gone or is most likely to have gone and may have took sum other things like pci card or graphics card with it. power going to the cd drives is normal becoz the psu is connected directly to the drives and the only thing connected to the mobo is the 40pin ide data cable which has nothing to do with it turning on as it doesnt supply power.
Okay I took apart the whole computer and removed the mother board. I dusted everything off and removed the 128 mb card that did the damage in the first place. I then put everything except for the 128 card back in and turned the computer on, everything was the same... hard drives and cd,dvd drives powered and running and the green light on the I/O button in the front of the tower still doesnt turn on... there was a slight change however, now, when I plug in my ethernet cable, the green led on my pci card turns on. So now i dont know what i should do next. is there anything else i can do to test the mobo because im sure the problem isnt with the psu since it powers the drives and the pci just fine
Suppose Faulty Computer is A and other computer is B........... Pull out PSU from CompB and put it in compA to see if mobo is working or not. If this doesnt work then, Take out all the things like HDD, Optical Drives, PCI cards and check them with your computerB....You might need to fiddle around with jumpers while fitting these things in your Comp B From HDD, copy all your data to your computerB. Also, if RAM is compatible on both the computers then check that also....
Okay, I will try that later, but can anyone tell me what is it exactly that makes it so that the green light in front of the computer, in the I/O button does not turn on anymore,and the monitor now turns green for a few seconds when i turn it on and then goes back to orange...
well i sed in an earlier post that it cannot really be the psu so in my opinion it is the motherboard and u will hav to get a new 1 becoz the mobo has been shorted out and some part of the mobo has been burnt out whilst others like u sed the ethernet card get power still recieves power becoz it does not follow that burnt out circuit. its like saying that in a series circuit there is more than one route and if one on the routes a disconnected, then the other will still work but unless u have every route working becoz it needs to communicate with that route aswell, then it will wrok but partially and not properly so this is pretty much the same as the mobo
I am okay at working with computers but I am not hardcore so I don't know much about hardware. It doesnt need to be the same exact motherboard right, it can be different? If so, where is the best place to get one, what is the price range, and if I can use other brands of mobos, which would you suggest?
Oh, by the way, where on the motherboard is the serial number/ number that I can look up to buy a new one, is it the number on the big square intel chip?
If the PSU was dead nothing would happen when you press the power button. Its the 20pin plug on the PSU which plugs into the board which allows the PSU to startup in the first place. I dont know about anything shorting because no power would flow through the board if that was the case. The PSU wouldn't startup and you wouldnt see any lights, open drives etc nothing. PSUs normally go out with a bang too. I imagine a silicon chip is dead preventing it to send instructions through the board. As for that intel chip; no that would be your northbridge or southbridge chip. Probably northbridge as they are usally the bigger one. I dont know if you can buy replacement dell motherboards, it would cost the same if not more than a cheap branded one anyway. Id prefer an Asus board over any Dell motherboard. If you want to get a new board you just need one which will take your processor. You dont need to spend loads. I used to buy £150 boards with intel chipsets but my last purcahse had a SiS chipset and it is really good. I think it was £30 (Asus P4S800) What processor have you got? And what does it say on that Intel chip?
thanks for all the help, i got a new dell mobo from ebay for like 20 bucks and all's well oh, i checked the bios and the original problem was that my processors max RAM capacity was 512mb so it did read the 128 card, but not all of the 512
