RE: [TCLUG:5065] Computer turn on (won't)

["Eric Hillman" <ehillman@cccu.com>]

> When a computer starts to overheat, what is first to go? I think
> that a short on a card or the motherboard could kill the power, but I
> don't know. Is there a way to force the power supply to turn on (unplug it
> from everything first) to see if it works?

	This doesn't sound to me like a plain old overheat -- overheats tend to
prompt spontaneous reboots well in advance of a total burnout..   But of
course these things can be unpredictable.  I'd guess a voltage spike or else
the power supply just burned out.
	I can tell you that a power supply should work regardless of whether
anything's plugged in to it -- if you plug it into, say, a CD-ROM drive, and
you have a pair of headphones, you should be able to eject the tray and play
CDs.  (I used to use an assembly like this as a desktop CD player at work,
until I finally got a tower case I could cram 2 CD drives into.)
	One thing that sounds likely is that the bearings in the fan went bad --
I've had this happen occasionally.  The fan starts generating a lot of heat,
until either you notice something's wrong, or it just blows.

> Also, if, say, my ram went dead would the power supply go on and then I
> would get some beeps coresponding to ram error or are ATX cases to
> 'advanced' to do this?

	You should, if the power supply is in good shape and nothing else on the
board is fried.