My apologies for jumping right in this morning without reading all the previous posts, but it's been a long night. I've broken & fixed my share of computers over the last 20 years but I've never seen this problem. Any ideas?
Yesterday morning, ironically while reading this board, our two-year-old eMachine crashed. Everything had been going along fine when the monitor lost its video feed and the computer stopped responding. The fan was still running and there were no other noises coming from the machine. It didn't seem to have slipped into hibernate mode because the indicator light wasn't blinking. The box, with its Athlon processor and CPU/RAM graphics emulator (no graphics card), is too cheap to have an "off" button. So I turned off the power at the surge suppressor, waited a few minutes, and pushed the computer's "on" button. The CD light came on (as if it was starting its boot sequence), the hard drive light came on solid yellow (instead of green flickering), and I could hear the HD heads unship... but nothing else happened.
It doesn't put out a video signal when it's turned on and the speaker doesn't beep any error messages. It doesn't even seem to start its BIOS read sequence let alone give me a chance to get at the BIOS settings. There aren't any obvious scorches or burn marks or smells on the motherboard or the CPU. I didn't get any temperature warnings or error messages and the machine had been acting fine before it died-- it just quietly lost its video output and stopped responding. The hard drive is fine-- it reads with no problems in the new computer. The monitor is fine too. I installed a video card in the old machine to see if there was a problem with the embedded video emulator but it didn't change the symptoms. (It's truly a plug & pray installation-- I can't even get to the BIOS, let alone change anything to reflect the video card's installation.) My trusty "Upgrading & Repairing Computers" indicates a CPU or motherboard fault but also suggests that a POST card is necessary for further troubleshooting.
Of course that troubleshooting may be more expensive than it's worth. Local firms are asking $75-$150 just to determine the problem, let alone fix it. With bare-bones boxes selling for $450 and having four times the capacity of this paperweight, finding the problem may be just an academic exercise. But if the problem is cheap & fixable then perhaps it'll solve my FIL's computer problem. Could all this frustration be caused by just a dead CMOS battery?
Buying a new machine took a lot less time than it'll take to reinstall everything & regenerate all our configurations settings. And as I've said at least once a year for the last two decades, thank goodness for weekly backups. I didn't need them this time but it was a good feeling knowing that I didn't have to be able to read the old HD. And it'll be a lot more enjoyable to do those new weekly backups on a DVD burner instead of a stack of CDs!
OK, I'm going catch up on my sleep and read the rest of the posts. Thanks for listening...
Yesterday morning, ironically while reading this board, our two-year-old eMachine crashed. Everything had been going along fine when the monitor lost its video feed and the computer stopped responding. The fan was still running and there were no other noises coming from the machine. It didn't seem to have slipped into hibernate mode because the indicator light wasn't blinking. The box, with its Athlon processor and CPU/RAM graphics emulator (no graphics card), is too cheap to have an "off" button. So I turned off the power at the surge suppressor, waited a few minutes, and pushed the computer's "on" button. The CD light came on (as if it was starting its boot sequence), the hard drive light came on solid yellow (instead of green flickering), and I could hear the HD heads unship... but nothing else happened.
It doesn't put out a video signal when it's turned on and the speaker doesn't beep any error messages. It doesn't even seem to start its BIOS read sequence let alone give me a chance to get at the BIOS settings. There aren't any obvious scorches or burn marks or smells on the motherboard or the CPU. I didn't get any temperature warnings or error messages and the machine had been acting fine before it died-- it just quietly lost its video output and stopped responding. The hard drive is fine-- it reads with no problems in the new computer. The monitor is fine too. I installed a video card in the old machine to see if there was a problem with the embedded video emulator but it didn't change the symptoms. (It's truly a plug & pray installation-- I can't even get to the BIOS, let alone change anything to reflect the video card's installation.) My trusty "Upgrading & Repairing Computers" indicates a CPU or motherboard fault but also suggests that a POST card is necessary for further troubleshooting.
Of course that troubleshooting may be more expensive than it's worth. Local firms are asking $75-$150 just to determine the problem, let alone fix it. With bare-bones boxes selling for $450 and having four times the capacity of this paperweight, finding the problem may be just an academic exercise. But if the problem is cheap & fixable then perhaps it'll solve my FIL's computer problem. Could all this frustration be caused by just a dead CMOS battery?
Buying a new machine took a lot less time than it'll take to reinstall everything & regenerate all our configurations settings. And as I've said at least once a year for the last two decades, thank goodness for weekly backups. I didn't need them this time but it was a good feeling knowing that I didn't have to be able to read the old HD. And it'll be a lot more enjoyable to do those new weekly backups on a DVD burner instead of a stack of CDs!
OK, I'm going catch up on my sleep and read the rest of the posts. Thanks for listening...
