First of all Happy New Year to the staff at Geeks to Go!
A few weeks ago my desktop machine would not start. No fans spinning, no power light, totally dead. I checked the cords and main switch, etc., and they were fine. I took it to a shop and they confirmed that the power supply had failed. I agreed for them to replace it. To make a long story short, the PS they put in was not the one we agreed on, so I asked for the replacement to be taken out and to return the machine to me. They did this and I purchased a new PS and installed it myself. (I built the computer about 10 years ago, and so have some experience.)
When I turned it on, it powered up, but I noticed a few things that were not the same as before the PS failed. I have a boot drive and a data internal drive. The data drive was not being recognized. Upon reopening the unit, I discovered that the SATA connector to my data hard drive was not connected. After reconnecting it, the drive was recognized.
Nevertheless, it's not the same machine as before. Some items may be more serious than others, but I don't know. Here is a list of things that concern me:
1. The blue power LED does not come on when the computer is running. It always did before. I checked the connector for the light and it's plugged in. I didn't disconnect it to see if the pins were maybe broken off when the shop did their work.
2. In addition to the PS and CPU fans, I have 3 other case fans. Two of the case fans are plugged into the motherboard (ASUS P5LD2 Deluxe). The third fan is plugged into a connector that is part of one of the PS cables. (It has a connector that accepts the fan connector.)
On the motherboard, there is also a connector called PWR_FAN. Nothing is plugged into this. (I don't recall if anything was ever plugged into this before.) Should there be something connected here? One reason that I'm asking about this is that the ASUS motherboard comes with a utility that displays cpu and motherboard temperatures and fan speed. It now shows 0rpm for the Power Fan in orange warning colour, whereas before I distinctly remember it used to display a speed in green colour, meaning it was OK.
3. Some of my desktop icons are shortcuts to web sites. Regardless of which one I click, it doesn't go to the website, but instead a window for my printer appears. How can the web shortcuts be fixed to go to the related website?
4. I have Windows XP running on the desktop. To the immediate right of the Start button, in the taskbar, there are now a number of icons for various programs. These never used to be there before. How do I hide these icons?
5. I notice that when I have a window open and then when I close it, the window doesn't disappear immediately. It's a bit difficult to describe, but it almost looks like the window collapses in distinct segments from top to bottom until the whole thing is gone. Mind you, this still occurs at a fairly high speed, but it's slowI enough that I can see what is happening. This "collapse" was not visible before. As I said, a window that was closed disappeared practically instantaneously. Can the slow closing of windows be corrected?
I realize that this may be very difficult to diagnose through a forum, and may be best served by having the machine directly in front of a technician. Nevertheless, I am hopeful that at least some of these issues may be solved by the good folks at Geeks to Go.
Thank you for your help,