Old system, no post...

[thegisguy]

About 5 years ago I built a system for my mother. It's an old Socket A AMD Athlon XP system with a ASUS MB, 512MB crucial memory, and a Nvidea 440 video card.

The system has worked great without so much a hicup for 5 years. Then a couple of days ago my mom called to say when she turned on her system nothing appeared on the monitor, it just said it had no signal. I said the VGA cable probably got bumped and came loose. She checked that, and said it was connected. Next I had her plug her laptop into the VGA cable to confirm the monitor worked, which it did. I mailed her an old ATI card of mine to rule out the video card. When she installed that, same thing. According to her the DVD drive lights come on, the CPU fan, PSU fan, and video card fans all come on, but not the case fans. She also gets no error code. Previously she would get the single beep during post, so there is a speaker. Thinking it might be the ram I had her pull that and try starting the system without any ram to see if it gave an error code, but it didn't.

Can anyone think of anything else to try before telling her it's time for a new system? At this point I'm thinking it's the MB. I know 5 years is a good run, but the system was fine for her. All she does is check email, and do a little surfing.

 

[bruceb]

First thing to check is the CMOS Battery .. replace it and reset the CMOS Bios to defaults and see if it boots up.
The hard drive could also have called it quits.

 

[thegisguy]

If the hard drive died it would still post, just not get past post. I hadn't thought about the Cmos battery. I'll have her replace that.

 

[mpilchfamily]

An acurate list of system parts may help here.

There is a good chance that the PSU is going bad. 5 years is about the average life span of most PSUs. The unit may not be compleatly dead but may be going dead. There is also a chance that the motherboard may be damaged. There may be buldging caps on the motherboard or in the PSU. In any case i think its time for a new PC.