[clug] Any ideas on what to look for to get an old PC running?

[David Schoen]

In this situation I always try just unplugging everything I possibly can:
Unplug drives (cdrom, hard drives, floppy if it still has one). I have
seen dead drives prevent machines from booting.
Unplug all PCI/AGP (yes this includes video) cards, anything in the USB.
Remove the RAM.

You should now just have a MB, PSU and CPU. If you press the on switch
and the fans still don't go you've usually got a dead PSU (try a new
one) or leaky capacitors as I think someone else mentioned. Leaky
capacitors are usually visually "bulgey", but not always.

On pulling apart PSUs I've had quite a lot of luck pulling them apart
and getting them going again, with everything from loose screws
shorting out components, to burnt out bits and just too much dust. But
I've also studied a fair bit of electronics and am very very very
careful.

On a side note: Your old pc p4 ... my *good* pc is still a p4 2.4GHz
... maybe it's finally time to upgrade :/ only problem is nothing I
run is noticeably slow :p

- Dave.

2008/12/22 jhock <jhock at iinet.net.au>:
> Hi All,
>
> Thanks to Ian (I love this list. It's so helpful) I have a power cord
> for my old PC (MISI Pentium 4).  I have now unpacked it all from storage
> however, when I switched it on nothing happened.  I don't want to spend
> too much effort on it because I hope to soon get an Eee PC 10 with LINUX
> (Once they are available in Australia) but I thought that I could use
> this one as a proxy, print server, game machine for my five year old,
> wireless modem firewall or something.  (I prefer to reuse than recycle.
> Its more energy saving.)
>
> I was wondering if anybody has any advice on how to get it to work. EG.
> is there likely to be a fuse inside, is there an area which I should
> "jiggle" when I open it, is there a good spot to bang it like they do on
> TV (Fonze type thoughts here)?  ;--)
>
> Thanks in advance for any help.
>
> John
>
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