I have a Dell P4 (Optiplex GX240) that was recently shifted from one room to another. It was working fine before it was moved but now its not even completing its BIOS test.
Usually at startup there is a screen with DELL written on it in big letters and a white progress bar that fills up in under 2 seconds. Below that white bar it says Bios Version A02. Now after it has been moved that bar fills up till about 1/3rd and then stops there. There is hardly any sound from any part of the CPU.
I took out the one RAM chip and tried it in different slots but that didnt seem to help. I tried inserting other RAM chips but that didnt help either. When i took out the RAM altogether though the CPU made loud noises asking for its RAM back.
I’m guessing the motherboard has become useless but im hoping it could be something else. Any ideas guys?
Cheegum bhai try disconneting the cables again and fix it one after another, restart and if the problem is the same then try booting up with cd, instead of using hard disk. I dont remember what key is used my guess its F2 or F8 something like that.
eagle: the pc is pretty cold, hasnt been run in 8 hours. there is no beep sound on bootup
acrobi: i tried tightening all loose connections. as for hdd/cd, thats not a problem yet because it doesnt even go that far.. its getting stuck at BIOS check..
it doesnt seem to be mobo prob or cpu...however heating could be it...is your heatsink fan running at full speed? - can u enter bios?, try with different PSU if it still doesnt work prolly PSU is alternating voltage too much...
You know what itsme01the voltage fluctuation problem was in my head all the while because the surge protector im using has a little light thats constantly flickering. I disconnected the keyboard, mouse etc pretty much everything except the monitor and that seemed to get the computer going and boot up.. but without any input devices.
So i guess the room im using this computer in doesnt have enough power to run this machine? Its funny because the same electrical outlet was just fine supporting about 6 other devices about a year ago.
Now that the computer is booting up without keyboard etc yes i can enter bios but how does one enter bios without a keyboad :D
Okay guess what guys. It wasnt a voltage problem after all. Its the stupid keyboard and mouse.. they both got shorted or something from inside and it seems they were sucking the power dry out of the cpu. As mentioned earlier the cpu booted fine without the keyboard and mouse. I replaced both with an older (similar) keyboard and another optical mouse and they work just fine. Both the old keyboard and mouse are now toast and basically useless.This is the first time ive seen something so wacky!
Anyway everything is back to normal now and its up and running. Thanks for all the input guys :)