Dell Dimension Help

niceguyrichy

pulling my hair out with this Dimension 5100 I'm trying to fix up.
the problem is that it will only start up from 'off' if I manually reset the mobo jumpers.
I've had it running perfectly for several hours, updated everything (drivers, media player, IE etc), restarted half a dozen times (note restarted) without a problem, but as soon as I shut it down it needs the jumpers reset and the BIOS reconfigured to get up and running again. otherwise pressing the power button does nothing. no beeps, no lights, no nothing.
so... why? what? where?

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OldBuzzard

Just a shot in the dark, but dead CMOS Battery maybe?

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When looking for a reason as to why things go wrong, never rule out sheer STUPIDITY

niceguyrichy

oops, should have put that in my original post; yes , I swapped out the battery already and it made no difference. also, now when I shut it down there's a little orange LED behind the front panel that slowly flashes at me
I'm thinking dead mobo tbh, although I really hope not.

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ChaosMinionX

Reflash the bios and see if that works?

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OldBuzzard

hmmmmmm.......

That flashing light...is it constant, or in 'code'? If the latter it might be giving you an 'error code'. Gotta be someplace to find out what the 'code' means

Also, it probably wouldn't hurt to re-seat all the cards and RAM. May not help, but couldn't hurt.

Possible PSU problem? We've all seen really weird things happen when a PSU is going out.

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When looking for a reason as to why things go wrong, never rule out sheer STUPIDITY

niceguyrichy

funnily enough, after my last post here I went and found a page that listed all the light and beep codes, but all it suggested for me was to reseat the memory, and of course the first thing I did anyway was test the major components, cables etc. with the notable xception though, of the CPU, on account of the fact that Dell felt the need to bolt vast lumps of plastic to the insides completely blocking access to it
but I'm gonna pull all that crap appart tomorrow and swap out the cpu, and if that doesn't work then I'm probably just gonna tell the owner to order a new mobo and cross my fingers
of all the other forums I've trawled through to find similar problems, only one person seemed to come back with a definitive solution. he bought a new motherboard. I was obviously hoping it wouldn't be anything so drastic, but...

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