Cleaned out inside of PC, now doesn't boot.

BlackScarletLove

Status:In Post-Production
Joined
6 Jul 2007
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I had a computer that I wanted to clean the dust out of. I've done it before and it's worked out fine.

So I removed the ram and the drives and the cabling and blew it all with one of those canned air dusters, holding the nozzle a few inches away. i made sure to remove static from my hands by frequently touching metal.
then I simply put everything back. Now the power comes on but nothing happens. The monitor says no signal. There doesn't appear to be any hard drive movement.

Can you help me fix this? This is a friends computer and I cant afford to buy him a new one
 
get the motherboard manual and make sure all the cables are connected to the board as they should be, make sure there is no dirt in the ram slots, i have cleaned pcs before and sometimes a little speck of dust can find its way back in.

Make sure the cpu is seated properly, sometimes even a little knock can cause issues, make sure the video card is also seated properly, this too can cause the system not to post as its sort of half seen and not seen, also as above check there is no dirt in there.

If the computer is a store bought pc (dell, hp) check to see if it has the diagnostic lights on it, normally they are a set of 4 leds, if all is good they should be green if not depending on the manufacture they could show as red or some other colour.

Check the manual or look on-line for what the combinations mean, also check the board closely see if you have broken any connections with the capacitors or any other soldiered joins
 
You know... I had something like this happen on my motherboard. The thing was, I couldn't figure it out. It woulddo the samething you describe (No hard drive movement, monitor signal is null) but the power comes on. Move the case around. also, either losen the motherboard and or get the casing so that it has some pressure somewhere else. That was the only conclusion I came up with.
 
What EP said, and make sure the power connectors are good :)

Honestly, the best thing to do right now is to disconnect EVERYTHING and then just power up after connecting enough devices so that your CPU has power. If things come up, then move to the next device and so forth.

Just make sure that all items are connected the right way, no pins are bent and that the devices that need power have their power connectors attached.

:D
 
This is just a thought, I have seen something similar to your problem a couple of times, and what had happened was the motherboard had onboard graphics as well as a graphics card fitted, and the connector was hooked up to the onboard instead of the card and as some BIOS's disable the onboard, no picture.
This may not be the problem, as I said it is just a thought.
 
I once found a not connected cpufan was the reason my pc didn't boot after I had put it together.
 
lol interesting that everyone's had different experiances with this type of situation. I'd figure this was one of those constant concrete issues.
Well the only reason I mentioned my experiance before was because when it happened to me, I had to move my PC from one apartment to another. When that happened, it wouldn't power up correctly which I thought was strange. Then it worked after I hooked the power up in my room. So I figured perhaps bad power flow in the place I was trying to hook it up to originally. So it worked from then on. But then at one point, it would still do the same thing again much later on but only at the place I have it hooked up to. I figure that it was the position of the system because that was the only thing that made sense.
 
Solved:

Thanks guys. I feel like an idiot. Turns out I was talking too much; I simply hadn't locked the RAM in, and didn't notice it on my subsequent inspection. >.<
 
Easy, yet funny mistake. It's good to see you got it fixed ...
 

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Also Hi EP and people. I found this place again while looking through a oooollllllldddd backup. I have filled over 10TB and was looking at my collection of antiques. Any bids on the 500Mhz Win 95 fix?
Any of the SP crew still out there?
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Impressed you have kept this alive this long EP! So many sites have come and gone. :(

Just did some crude math and I apparently joined almost 18yrs ago, how is that possible???
hello peeps... is been some time since i last came here.
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Rest in peace my friend, been trying to find you and finally did in the worst way imaginable.

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