Computer won't start

There's actually a couple of things it could be.

You could have a bad power supply, a faulty card or drive.

I would be leaning towards a power supply. What kind of power supply is it? You have to becareful with buying cheaper power supplies. Even though they have a high wattage, they eventually cause wierd problems.

If you don't have a power supply and don't want to buy one just to test, You could disconnect all devices and drives leaving just CPU, video card and memory. See if the computer boots. Then connect device back up one at a time. See which one holds the system down.

Some of the AMD boards for the XP chips also had a problem with bad capacitors. Check the capacitors to see if any are buldging or leaking. If they are, you'll need to replace the board.

Have you done any over clocking?

firstly check the switch for reset or on off is not stuck
try with shorting
try removing cmos battery

Have you tried to unplug the power cable and after plug in and start the computer?
Your description it seams to me a standby or hibernate state of your computer. Also it?s seams the restart button is not functional. In this case the solution is described before.

Have you tried to start up with just the CPU? Then just with CPU and Video? CPU and Memory? We've had to do this because of errors we were getting. It may help to track it either one was the issue. I know there would be no vid, but hopefully you'll get a beep code. If no luck, I would replace the mother board.

Good luck

Tim

To check for a capacitor leaking look at it, you should not see any goo on the top, sides etc. Also a capacitor may bulge on the top. Any signs of this and you should check out this site. www.badcaps.com They may beable to replace the capacitors for you, and the site has lots of info on capacitors.

Good Luck!

A capacitor is much like a battery as it is able to store electrcity. A capacitor is round in shape and comes in different sizes. Your motherboard will have lots of them they generally have a silver top and the sides are some kind of color. They should have a flat top and will have small seams on the tops. The looks will be simular to a battery. If any of them are buldging at the top or have any kind of corrosion on top they are bad. They will cause the motherboard to fail.

Did you forget to diagnose the monitor?

Is the light Amber or Green on the monitor when you fire up the system?

Don't rule out the simple solutions before you tear apart your system.

also, since my video card fan is not running, the gigabyte tech support said there might be a problem with it, too...is that right?? apparently, i've narrowed it down to either the motherboard or the cpu...there's no easy way to check if either is the problem, is there? all I can do is get another cpu and try it on the motherboard?