Mainboard slow to boot

[hodgee]

I have a DFI Mainboard with a Via Cyrix II 550 MHZ chip on it socket 370. The computer has worked fine without any hiccups ( other than virus's) for the past 12 months and has only now developed a problem in taking time to power on from when the power button is pressed. Over the last week it started to take 90 seconds to boot.... boot I mean send power to the mainboard, as the CPU Fan does not commence until the mainboard accepts the power then it works like the charm that it always has.
Now it is taking nearly 5 minutes to boot.
All the Ram ,Video has been double checked and works fine on other systems.
The problem is totally isolated to the mainboard which appears to be the culprit as there is no action on the CPU while it is waiting to accept the power on from the power supply,
Has anyone experienced this problem before and is aware of a work around.
I have seen it on a Gigabyte socket 7 GA5AA mainboard and did all the bios upgrades AND in the end the board went from 90 seconds to boot to 1 hour and half and then just gave up. I contacted Gigabyte but was not able to get any reply.
Appreciate any assistance.
Ron

[Jimstep]

It's possible for virus's to get into the BIOS. You might try re-flashing a known-good copy of your BIOS to see if that helps.

[piyopiyo13]

Could it be the power supply that's the culprit?

[hodgee]

I have taken the mainboard out of the case and have it on the test bench with a different power supply. Still the same problem. I have also used different memory and video card which are known to be good.
The mainboard has just booted after 7 minutes this time and as I said earlier no power is accepted anywhere on the board until it is ready to boot other than the switch that turns the power on from the power supply. When the cpu fan starts the computer boots fine and in this case it took 7 minutes for the cpu fan to start.
My hunch of the mainboard being the problem is centred around the possibility of dry solder joints as what happens to some monitors but how the hell can one tell
Ron

[piyopiyo13]

Yeah... I'm leaning towards some capacitor or something taking an abnormally long time to charge. If that's the case, repairing your computer probably isn't going to be a user-end job.

[hodgee]

After running just now I powered off and had a closer look at all the capacitors etc and found some dust and foreign matter ..cleaned it up and reset the CPU again but after 20 minutes now still no action so I guess the answer is that the capacitor that powers the initial function has given in completely now so it is time to put the board to rest and replace it.

Thanks for all your assistance

Ron

[hodgee]

Had already replaced the battery. We have come up with the problem being associated with a possibility of a capacitor failure on the mainboard