MetaChat - Sigh.

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30 October 2006

Sigh. Computer woes inside.→[More:]
I've built every PC I've ever had, until last July when I realized that I could save a ton of money on a Dell through my company. I bought an XPS for 40% off. Nice.

Now it won't boot. In the past, I've always diagnosed and fixed hardware problems myself, but the innards of this Dell are much more complex than any I've dealt with before. Plus, I have a lot less time for tinkering than I used to. Plus, I think Dell uses proprietary parts. When I turn it on, I see the mobo splash screen, and then it goes to a blank screen with a blinking cursor. That's it. I can't get into the BIOS to tell it to boot from CD - when I hit F2 on the first screen, it says "Entering setup", but then it still just goes to the blank screen. I get no "boot beep", and the hard drives never spin up. So I'm thinking motherboard. My parents were in town this weekend so I didn't have any time but before I call tech support, I'm going to reseat all my connections and try again. Any other ideas or general advice for dealing with Dell in this situation?

post by: mike9322 at: 08:49 | 14 comments

Not mentioned in FPP: my work laptop died months ago, but since I don't actually use it onsite, my boss decided not to send me a replacement. I run an SSH proxy server from my (currently dead) PC at home and Putty into it to get around the draconian internet restrictions at work. Meaning I currently have absolutely no way to check my gmail. Oh, and my girlfriend is out of town for two weeks. Oh, and I cut myself shaving BAD this morning. Oh, and I forgot my fucking ipod because I rely on my daily reminder email to remember to grab it in the morning.

I'm having a bad day.

posted by mike9322 30 October | 08:56

*hands mike a basket of buffalo wings and The Complete Spongebob Squarepants DVD*

posted by sciurus 30 October | 09:00

Power supply problem, as likely as anything. Get out the vacuum cleaner, and maybe the Canned Air, and get medieval on it. Also could be corrupted CMOS, due, maybe, to a dead/dying on-board CMOS battery. There is usually a jumper to short on desktop motherboards that clears CMOS contents, and you can frequently replace the battery yourself. After you do these things, you should be able to enter setup (you'll have to, actually) to re-detect your hard drive and optical drives, and set date, etc in BIOS. Saving and exiting BIOS setup then stores your preferences for BIOS options to CMOS memory, including shadow RAM preferences for video, which is the usual problem with a corrupt CMOS "stopping" the boot process, and giving no error beep codes.

posted by paulsc 30 October | 09:16

paulsc is my hero. More suggestions welcome.

God I hope I remember to print this out before I leave work. Wouldn't that be a comedy of errors?

posted by mike9322 30 October | 09:21

My advice is to start drinking and not stop until you no longer care about broken computers and left behind iPods. And then start working on the computer.

Seriously though, bummer. I could help but I'm no good with PCs, just Macs.

posted by fenriq 30 October | 10:46

I'm completely useless in these situations, with the exception for sympathy and buffalo wing sharing.

posted by Specklet 30 October | 12:37

"Have you tried switching it off and on again"

*standard reply from my company's IT department to any computer-related problem*

posted by essexjan 30 October | 12:40

Oh, and if you give us your password and we'll check your gmail for you ;-)

posted by essexjan 30 October | 12:41

My password is 12345.

posted by mike9322 30 October | 12:45

That's the same combination on my luggage!

posted by sciurus 30 October | 12:52

Okay. Weird.

I took a vacuum to it and reseated all the mobo connections. Booted it while on its side and open to the air. It worked! Hooray! Shut down, closed up, set it upright, powered on.... same problem.

Now it's on its side again and wide open and working. Looks to be a cooling problem of some sort? AFAICT all fans are running. I am going out after dinner to get some compressed air and make sure to get all the gunk out (though right now it looks pretty damn clean) but damn it sucks to have to run the computer this way. Argh.

posted by mike9322 30 October | 16:52

Sciurus, that's one of my favorite movies of all time.

Mike, it's gonna be hard to type that way!

*hands mike bandaids for shaving cut*

posted by redvixen 30 October | 21:14

Something that is reliably related to the physical orientation of the box is usually resolved as a loose connection, or other mechanical problem. One thing that can happen with the larger Pentium 4 heat sinks over time, is that the weight of heat sink hanging off the motherboard, can deflect the motherboard, causing bad connections in AGP and PCI sockets when the machine is in the normal vertical position. Pay very close attention to card connectors, DIMM module sockets, the back of the motherboard against the main case plate, and similar mechanical interference points, when tipping the case to the normal position. You really have to go slow, be patient, and take it apart/put it together several times to find these things.

posted by paulsc 30 October | 21:35

Again, thank you, paulsc. Yeah, as I was cleaning it last night and removed the cover over the heatsink, I was dumbfounded at the size of the thing. Technology has come a long way since my last PC build (2002?). I'm so out of the loop.

My girlfriend came home unexpectedly last night (yay!!) so my tinker time was limited even more than usual. So right now the behemoth is sitting on its side, happily hosting my proxy server and allowing me blissful internet freedom. It'll stay that way till she has to go back out of town later in the week. But at least it's working.

posted by mike9322 31 October | 08:38

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