Do rural areas get dodgy power? I lent someone a machine over the weekend, who lives around 30mins out of town. It's come back and it powers on, but won't POST, no BIOS beeps and no display. I've tried to rule out components by trying brand new RAM, a brand new PSU, and a brand new GFX card. I've also tried powering it on with no HDD or optical drive plugged in and I've also removed all other PCI devices. So I'm forced to blame either the mobo or CPU but I have no spares of either to test them. This machine is gaming quality, and less than two years old. So anyway the machine doesn't seem to have suffered a fall or anything which brings me to my question of the quality of power in rural areas. And also do you guys know of anything else I could test on this machine?

Reset your CMOS? just a thought.

Ohkay I tried that, nothing has changed

Yeah, in rural areas you get problems with all sorts of farm/orchard equipment that create surges and brownouts (electric fences, irrigation pumps, etc) and also apparently most rural people share a circuit without a transformer or something to block the surges between them, so lots of chance that a surge will make it to you.

You need a UPS preferably with surge protection built in.

Did you check the parts you think are broken for any burn marks or leaking components?

Well the only parts that I think could be broken, are the mobo or CPU. But no, no visible damage. It powers up, all fans go and drives spin up. But no beeps, and no display. Do mobo's fail all at once or can they partially die and still power fans and stuff

Stupid question but have you checked the monitor?

Judle Wrote:Well the only parts that I think could be broken, are the mobo or CPU. But no, no visible damage. It powers up, all fans go and drives spin up. But no beeps, and no display. Do mobo's fail all at once or can they partially die and still power fans and stuff

Well, it would depend on how the circuits are set up and what components are broken. If by some miracle all the stuff for the BIOS and the chipset or CPU fan happen to be on the same circuit (which is so unlikely that it's probably not worth mentioning because I think they'd use different voltages) then the fans wouldn't work if the broken part cuts the circuit.
It sounds a lot like a CPU problem. Best way to test that is to switch it. Best way to solve the problem, though, is to move to a location where some form of civilized society exists

Yeah I've tried a different monitor, but it should BIOS beep without a working monitor anyway, or at least give me the good ol' Num Lock light. I have no other AM2 CPU to swap into it, and the machine is here at work behind a UPS. The machine was loaned the the customer for the weekend while she took her machine back to Noel Leeming for some sort of return. Shes the customer that I mentioned not long ago that had Vista on half a gig

Quote:Do mobo's fail all at once or can they partially die and still power fans and stuff

Sure do. more often than not in my experience. I once had a motherboard that would cook CPU's when put it. I cooked 3 CPU's before I realized it was the motherboard and not the cpu that was stuffed (after returning the borrowed cpu to its machine and realizing it no longer worked). Lucky they were second hand Pentium 3's and were only like $40 each at the time.