Being superstitious is no stranger to computer guys! I know one guy that will not power up a newly built PC before checking that all screws are present and tight. This might seem strange to you, but consider the fact that he once spent a day troubleshooting an error in his PC only to find out that his VGA would not work unless screwed on the case!
I have many such examples and now I have one of my own!
I finally finished building my sister’s upgrade and was happy with myself for doing it rather quickly. So I plugged everything in and hit the on/off switch on the PSU (that is the thing in your PC that provides the electrical power, the one you plug with the power mains cord). To my surprise the system starts booting!
First alarm; PCs shouldn’t power up when you turn the PSU on, they should wait for the power switch to be pressed…
Second alarm; the monitor is still in standby mode (power light is still orange, instead of green) so it doesn’t receive any signal…
Third alarm; there are no POST beeps (if something is wrong, the computer will let you know by emitting a series of beeps in a special way that is specific for every possible problem it can find, i.e. one long and two short beeps mean there is something wrong with the motherboard). That was what really got me worried.
Final kill point; power button does not work!
At this time I’m sweating (figuratively speaking)! Quickly unplug everything and run the basic hardware troubleshoot everyone who is a computer geek knows how to do; remove everything but the CPU and memory, unplug everything except the power cord and hope for the best. Unfortunately, the end result was the same, the PC would power up but still no beeps and the power switch would still not work!
It was time to check the case connectors, those little cables that connect the power switch, reset switch, power light and HDD activity light to the motherboard. They have the tendency to NOT be clear which way they should go and that surprises me still. Every other plug on the motherboard has a physical shape that allows only one way for a cable to connect. Imagine a whole that is in the shape of a square, but one side of it is curved. Now there is only one way for a cable that has this shape to fit in this hole (and indeed the main power cables to the motherboard bear this very shape I just mentioned). Why is it that the case cables still don’t have this? …
In any case, after trying many many variations on those cable orientations, I head to the Internet. Using again a variety of keywords and boolean expressions involving power switch not working and power being available to the machine, I could only find the worst case scenario (and about 80% of those cases involving MACs that are known to suffer such a problem), mainly that either the PSU was insufficient or that the m/b was fried.
Combined with the previous strain I put my m/b under while installing the CPU fan, I was almost in tears in fear that I had somehow broken the m/b.
So I tried one solution I could think of, switching PSUs. I had the new case I bought for the NAS system and it was larger in wattage since it would host plenty of HDDs. But it was also newer and I thought (without reason) that it might be better.
Of course it was not… and by that time I was ready to give up. At that time, the geek in me rose up and refused to admit defeat just yet! There was one thing I could still do. Remove everything and build the system out of all the new parts!
Confused? Let me clear it up a bit; the first system I build had these things from the old system: case, PSU, HDD, DVD-ROM. The new parts were the m/b, the CPU and the memory. Eventually the HDD and the DVD-ROM were also removed, but it would still not run, and I even used the new PSU and it would still not run, so all that was left was the case!
‘So change that too!’, the geek in me said, and he was RIGHT!
Upon building the system in the new case the system worked PERFECTLY!
EXPLAIN THAT!