Old PC powers on but does not send image to monitor.

[Red Hawk]

My family has an old Dell PC -- 2.6 GHz Pentium 4 (probably Northwood), 1 GB DDR RAM (4 256 MB sticks), eVGA Geforce 7300 GT AGP, 32 GB HDD, Windows XP Professional. I just got back home for spring break to find that this PC is not working anymore. It powers on, but the monitor does not wake from sleep to display an image (It's an LCD monitor, less than a year old).

Observations:
No beeps that I've heard. The PC appears to stay powered until turned off; the CPU fan works, but the GPU fan does not turn on. There's some noise from the DVD drive and HDD when the PC powers on.

Troubleshooting steps I've taken:
I removed the graphics card and plugged the monitor in to the motherboard's VGA port to run from the integrated graphics chip. Same results.

I know it's not the hard drive, because if it was the PC would still POST and get to where it fails to recognize a boot drive. The CPU fan is working so it's probably not the CPU overheating, and even if it was the PC would probably get at least a few moments of trying to POST before crashing entirely. It's not the graphics card because I get the same problem with the integrated graphics chip.

I'm thinking it's either the RAM or the power supply. If it's the power supply, I'll probably just salvage the hard drive and do away with the rest of the PC.

So, any suggestions from Anandtechers on what this could be and how to solve it that I haven't thought of yet?

 

[Bubbaleone]

Try removing the CMOS battery, or jumper the pins to reset the BIOS to defaults. I know on a lot of old Dell's if it's set to boot a discrete graphics card, it won't boot the onboard VGA until you either change the setting or (in your case) reset the BIOS.

 

[Deltaechoe]

Yeah, just remove the CMOS battery and try to boot (with the gpu out still), see what happens

 

[mikeymikec]

A more passive option that CMOS resetting is reseating RAM (as well as trying one at a time, swapping slots in use, etc).

 

[Steltek]

Take a close look at the motherboard to see if it has any burst or leaking capacitors. That machine is old enough to have been manufactured back when those defective capacitors were being used in everything.

 

[gotsumquestions]

It may be a long shot, but it wouldn't hurt to test with a different monitor if you have one available. The monitor you have is probably fine, but in the off chance that there's an issue, it may save you some headache. Also, reseat the RAM as mentioned above. It takes 1 minute and you can scratch one thing off the list.