I was going to post my problem here but after skimming through the forum I noticed that you guys don't do much troubleshooting here. Can someone recommend a good site to help me or would someone here be willing to help? Thanks.
Thanks brudda. I have 4 or 5 year old Gateway that runs Windows XP. The last time I tried to start it, the light on the front of the tower came on and I could hear the fan but nothing else happened. Nothing but a black screen. When it was working there was a tone like a single beep that sounded a few seconds after I started it. It doesn't do that now. This happened one other time and I got it going by trying to start it a few times a day. Finally it fired up. It doesn't seem like it's going to do that this time. I was just leaving it on after that but my wife restarted or turned it off and here I am. I could go buy a new one but I really need to save all our photos - yeah I made the classic mistake of not backing them up. I know the info is kinda vague so if you need any more, please just ask. Thanks again.
ok mate thats defiently a hardware problem, It could be 1 of a few things but my first thought is a dodgy PSU (Power supply unit) I've had machines do this in the past and 80% of the time the capacitators in the PSU are dieing/died the other 20% is a possable CPU problem or something is short-circuiting. Open your PC push all cables firmly into thier slots to make sure theyre properly in, See if any LED's are lit on your motherboard when you try powering it up too. If no luck I would try another PSU, Maybe borrow a mates or if you cant you can get them pretty cheap but I would never advise anyone on buying a cheap PSU as this often happens whats happened to you, If you can identify it as the PSU being the problem I would buy a Corsair PSU around 400-500W will be fine if its not a have gaming machine. If you do endup just scraping the machine take your Hard drive out and put it in your new one.. Or if you dfont feel confident doing this take it to a PC shop and have them put it into a External enclosure for you (theyre about £10) and link the old hard drive upto you new pc/laptop via USB and recover your files you dont want to lose.
Cool. I'm at work now but I'll try that when I get home. I've changed power supplies before so that's no problem. I'll report back about the motherboard LED's. Thanks for the help man
could just be something as simple as the CMOS battery on the mother board too. it looks like a big watch battery and is alot cheaper fix than a PSU. if its not the CMOS battery then i would follow chr0nicxs advice.
you sure can, i would suggest taking the old one out and taking it with you to match, i know for a fact that radio shack will carry it. not sure about best buy.
Well I put a new power supply in and it's still the same. I'll try the motherboard battery and see if that's it. BTW I don't see any LED's on the motherboard. Not sure if there are supposed to be any or not.
a no-start condition like that could be caused by bad memory, bad processor, bad motherboard, bad hard drive (ive seen it before, messed up hard drives that didnt allow the computer to boot), bad power supply, etc. etc. unfortunately that is a really hard issue to fix unless you have other parts to swap out one at a time. might consider taking it somewhere if the CMOS battery doesn't do the trick, or make friends with someone whos got a bunch of extra computer parts.. lol
Just put in the new battery and that didn't work either. I guess I'll take it to Best Buy and see what they think even though I hate to since I've heard some bad things about the Geek Squad. I'd like to just go buy a new one and probably will soon but I'm really hoping I can salvage the hard drive and our pictures somehow. Thanks for trying guys, and dumped43, I wish I had the resources to check the stuff you mentioned, but unfortunately I don't. And my daughters' are getting real tired of me using their PC (even though I bought it for them) hehe.
look for a small local shop, or maybe someone on craigslist looking for side work. see if you can be there and watch while they work on it, so you know they arent going through your shit. i wouldnt take it to geek squad either