system won't restart or power down

[plasma6]

Hello all,

I've had a Dimension 4600 for about a week. When I select "Restart" from the "Turn off computer" screen, the screen goes blank, but the system does not restart.

Also, when I first used the computer and selected "Turn off", the computer would power down without pressing the power button, now it does not. I quite liked the auto power down feature.

I've downloaded a load of Microsoft patches from their site and erroneously tried to install Logitech drivers for a serial cordless mouse. This caused the mouse to be unresponsive so I deleted the updated drivers and am using standard mouse drivers.

Does anybody have any thoughts as to how to address these troubles? (not the mouse one, don't much care about that, I mention it only to provide some history)



Thanks very much,

plasma6

 

[amdskip]

I really don't know what could be wrong with your system. I would try running memtest86 or swapping out memory. Could the windows install be corrupt? What operating system are you running? Could be a bad motherboard too, Dell's are pretty flakey.

 

[VansTheMan]

Did you call Dell and see what they have to say about it? If you've only had it for a week, you're still within the "magical 30 days" where you can return the computer for any reason at all. If you do call Dell, make sure you use your Express Service code. That will get you a little bit quicker service and less of a chance of being bounced around, which seems to be standard operating procedure for Dell tech support these days. It could be that the motherboard isn't sufficiently communicating with the power supply. It might just be a power supply issue too. There are a lot of things that it could be. I would definitely call Dell and get some service because a problem like that within the first week of ownership is ridiculous.

 

[plasma6]

I called Dell tech support and they told me to re-install the operating system (XP). I was about to when I decided to try the system restore utility. It seems to have worked.

The only driver I updated was the ATI Radeon 9800, with Catalyst 3.7. I think I'll hold off on this for a while, as it may have been the cause of the problem.

Thanks for all replies, much appreciated.

Andrew
(plasma6)

 

[VansTheMan]

Wow, I think you're the first person I've met that system restore actually worked for. I turned that option off a long time ago because it was a waste of 600 or so MB of perfectly good disk space. Glad to hear everything worked out.