[juliaatgeekstogo]

Hi,

My colleague has given me his old PC to see what's wrong with it - he says I can have it if I can repair, he's replaced it already.

When you press the power button the power button itself flashes orange and continues to do so. However, pressing the power button again doesn't power the machine down again - even if you hold it in for a few minutes.

The same thing happens if I plug in a hard drive of my own.

However, when I connect the original hard drive - as well as the flashing orange light, there is also a flashing red light above the power button and a constant beeping sound until you turn it off (by unplugging the power cable as the button still doesn't work).

Changing the power supply makes no difference to the above patterns.

Do you have any idea what might be wrong ?

I'm very curious about why the power button doesn't switch off the PC, because it's something I've come across before on PCs that I've not been able to fix (I suspect because the board has a fault).

I've just joined Geeks to go so this is my first posting so I hope my post is fine in terms of location, style and content. Before joining I checked out a few topics and it looked great !


Regards,
Julia Evans

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Restart the computer, go into the BIOS and then try to power off the PC in the normal fashion.

It's perfectly possible that the operating system is screwed up so putting it into standby will usually lock it up. In the majority of cases if Windows locks up you can just reset the system but there is another state that occurs with ageing hardware in that if the board locks up it will not respond to the normal power-off sequence so all you can do is pull the plug. This is ultimately a board problem. The board should be replaceable but it'll be old technology now so cost wise it's probably not even worth doing.

[Neil Jones]

Restart the computer, go into the BIOS and then try to power off the PC in the normal fashion.

It's perfectly possible that the operating system is screwed up so putting it into standby will usually lock it up. In the majority of cases if Windows locks up you can just reset the system but there is another state that occurs with ageing hardware in that if the board locks up it will not respond to the normal power-off sequence so all you can do is pull the plug. This is ultimately a board problem. The board should be replaceable but it'll be old technology now so cost wise it's probably not even worth doing.