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General discussion

New PC Won't Start Up

Jun 14, 2005 7:59AM PDT

Hi, I really hope you cnet gurus can help me.

My PC won't start-up correctly. It was fine yesterday then today it just won't start-up - what will happen is it will come on for 1/2 a second then switch off completely. There aren't any unusual noises or beeps. When the PC turns off, the front blue LED light around the power button keeps flashing very slowly.

It got me completely baffled because I have a good Q-TEC 550WP Dual Fan Gold PSU connected to: MSI 6741 motherboard, AMD Athlon 3400+ CPU, AGP nVidia GeForce 6800Ultra, two IDE 200GB Western Digital Caviar hard disk, two NEC 3420 DVD-RWs, two sticks of DDR-SDRAM 512MB 184-pin 2700, Gigabit LAN PCi card, Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 Value PCI card, floppy and a external Maxtor 200GB USB2 drive. I'm running Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 2.

I've tried tirelessly to resolve it by trying the following in separate attempts then tried to start the PC without any success: removing the graphics card, removing the LAN card, removing the sound card, unconnected the back case 8" fan, unconnected the front case bottom 8" fan, unconnected the exhaust fan.

I'm open to any suggestions here and need the PC up and running soon, otherwise it's off to a PC repair shop as a last resort - something I can't really afford to do.

Discussion is locked

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RE:
Jun 14, 2005 9:26AM PDT

Check the RAM. Try removing the power cord from the psu and push the power button to reset.

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Resetting Power/RAM Didn't Work
Jun 14, 2005 12:03PM PDT

QUOTE: ''Check the RAM. Try removing the power cord from the psu and push the power button to reset.'' damasta55r

I've looked at the RAM and it looks fine but since the two sticks are identical, I switched them around. Then I left the PC unplugged for 2 hours and unplugged the power cord from the PSU as suggest, then pushed the power botton on the PC, plugged the power cable back in at both ends and turned it on.

It's still doing the same thing - switching on then off for 1/2 a second with the blue LED power light flashing on and off every second.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestion, it was worth a try.

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"it will come on for 1/2 a second then switch off completely
Jun 14, 2005 9:32AM PDT

Most common issue for this one is an extra mounting post shorting out under the motherboard.

Or IDE devices gone bad. Check the posts and unplug the IDE cables then try.

Bob

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Solved It : )
Jun 15, 2005 11:58PM PDT

It was worring me that I might have to take the motherboard off the casing but I didn't have to. I also tried various other IDE cable tricks like unplugging them all and switching the PC...

Anyway, the problem has been SOLVED. Even though the PSU was under 6 months old - it was faulty and did the same thing when I tried it out in my other older PC.

I still don't get it how this crappy Q-Tec 550WP Watt PSU works for 1/2 a second and switched off. Is this a common fault with Q-Tec PSU's? I did pay about

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Luck of the draw.
Jun 16, 2005 12:30AM PDT

I wouldn't pan that model for this failure. It's a mass produced model with (I bet) 99 out of 100 work just fine. You could complain if they don't exchange it.

Bob