We had a 2 hour power outage yesterday, and I let the small UPS that our el-cheapo Inspiron 518 was hanging off of just go until it ran out of juice; the computer was not set to be shutdown by the UPS. Mistake?
With power back on, went to turn it back on and nothing happened. Spent the rest of the day trying to revive it via lots of Googling for tips and instructions. I did not find one place with a good set of instructions, but this is what I did:
Checked on/off switch; contact is good (brown and blue close when button is depressed). Try shorting pins anyway.
Checked power supply; seemed good. Removed 24-pin connector from the microATX board and short the green to ground, plugged in AC, and PSU fan and DVD drive started. Checked voltages on all pins, all spot-on, except the one pin that is supposed to tell the MoBo the PSU is up; that came in at +4.78v; doubt that is too far off from +5v to make a difference.
Cleaned out a lot of dust; the CPU heat sink was pretty well choked up. Maybe it overheated. The computer could actually have been down before the power outage. But a 3am backup from another system, saving its disk image to the 518, worked, so it was up then. (Outage was 10am.)
Removed all connectors and memory; removed little battery (to perhaps reset CMOS); still no power up, no lights, no beeping, no nuttin'. But amber light on mobo says standby power is getting to it.
Didn't find any tips on determining if it is the processor or the mother board.
Replacement processor is $50; replacement mobo $79. This thing has a Pentium E2220 (dual core), 2.4gHz. Decide it is not worth trying to get fixed by replacing processor and mobo.
Look for better mobo and something like a Core i3. Did not find any real obvious great choices that would give me a working system without a lot of work.
This is disappointing since the computer was less than 2 years old (but due to some Dell ordering problems, ended up costing <$300). Wonder if it has a cheap mobo.
Decided to buy new computer. Look at lots of HPs, Dells, odd brands, bare-bones, build-yer-own. Want to spend very little but want something pretty fast since I'm doing some programming on it and sometimes video editing. End up ordering a Lenovo H420 with a Core i3-2120 (3.3gHz) and 4GB of 1333 DDR3, 1TB disk, etc., $469 from Newegg; free shipping and no sales tax (which of course I'll pay directly to my home state, really.) Plan to keep this one cleaner.
Maybe some day I'll work on putting a new mobo in the 518 case, which is all clean now, and has a good 300W PSU. I liked the two USB ports on the top, where you can rest your phone/music player when charging.