One of my computers has quit on me and I dont quite know where to start looking as this has never happened to me before. The computer power light will come on and it will run for just a few seconds then shut down. Both the cpu fan and the power supply fan come on when the button is pushed so I dont think overheating was the problem. I havent a clue where to start as it wont even get to the boot stage. I have removed all add-on hardware and it still does it. Any ideas?
this may help: http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ basically, you may need to cut your self a bart pe cd. this is basically a cut down version of windows that boots off the cd rom, not your hard disk. this could help you salvage any lost data etc when my pc died, i used it to get my stuff back. im no techie though......
I am no techie geek but you might have major problems ... had a laptop that died like that on me took out the battery ... for a week or longer then put it back in ... damn pc worked again ( yipee ) , but then after a few days ... could not start up re boot ( now using an apple )
thats why bart pe was so good. my hd was screwed which is why i couldnt boot from it - but bartpe still managed to see the files!!
If you are getting shut down without even the booting beep from the board > I would pull out everything except a stick of memory and the video card, also all the drive cables. Make sure the board is not shorted, ck screws. Then power it to see if it posts-booting beep- if not still lots of possibilities,psu, cpu ,current memory stick or bad /shorted board. But at least now its limited to whats there.
Just replace it - why bother screwing around when the problem may occur when you need the pc to work.
Do you have another similar computer or one with the same RAM? I would guess that you have a bad stick of RAM in there. If it doesn't go through the boot process at all, then your problems are RAM, a motherboard short, a CPU that is not seated well, etc.
Does _anything_ appear on the monitor at all for the few seconds it is on, meaning does it start the BIOS power-on self-test? (POST) To be honest that sounds pretty serious (assuming it doesn't POST at all) so unless you are willing to really mess around with it I suggest you just suck it up, buy a new PC and migrate the hard drive over as a secondary drive so you can get all the data you want from it. Even a PC with no hard drive attached will still POST, it will just end in an error like "no boot device" so I doubt its the hard drive that is the problem.