"Jill" wrote in message
...
likely because it's a Dell, but I thought I would ask for help anyway.

So, here's the deal. Things been a POS from the get go, and spent the
last year sitting on a desk bearly used (maybe once a month). A couple
of months ago my system went down and the Dell became the new home office
computer. Since, it's been running 24hrs a day, as I never turn my
desktop off (for a number of reasons).

Last night I moved it from one room to another and set it back up and
when I pressed the power button, nothing happened. I held it down fir a
minute to try and reset it and turned the power bar off (which caused the
lights on the front of the case to light up breifly maybe as a means of
flushing any risidual power out?) and then turned the power back on
again. After pressing the power button a couple of more times in
frustration, IT STARTS!

Since its now in my bedroom, I turned it off when I was done and it
hasn't been willing to turn on again since. I spent some time screwing
with the button, but no go.

So, I figure its the power supply. Swapped it out for the one from the
broken system (since it was the mobo that went on that one) and I ended
up with a very strange result. The new PS is a Super Flower 350W/370W (?
if that makes sense) and has three fan settings. Each of these settings
has its own colour light (blue, green and red) to make it easy to see
what speed you have it on. Now, with this new PS in, when turn the PS
on, I get a flash of lights on the front of the case, the fan spins for a
second and then the fan light goes very dim. Its still on, but very
faint. When I press the power button on the front of the case, still
nothing happens. When I turn the PS off, I get the same thing; fan light
gets bright, fan spins for a sec, lights on front of case, then the power
goes off.

unplugged everything, but 1 stick of RAM, 1 HD, and that's about it.

Thoughts, ideas, suggestions? Any help would be much appreciated.

A

About the only thing left is the motherboard itself. These power supplies
are fairly sensitive to overload, and will shut themselves down, which might
be what you are seeing happening when the lights dim.

In the last couple of years, there was an issue with ' fake ' electrolytic
capacitors which had been purchased by a number of far east MB
manufacturers, and incorporated into their products. These started to fail
in fairly short order, but some kept going for quite some time. As I recall,
the ones which gave most trouble, were all located physically around the CPU
chip, and you could see the tops of them bulging when they went bad.

Might be way off beam here, and there's probably others on here who might be
able to better advise you, but that's my two penn'orth anyway, for what it's
worth.

Arfa