Ed. note: If you read SysOpt's 5/9 newsletter forward, chances are you'll find the following article to be a bit familiar. But, I've included other new tips in this addition, plus photos to illustrate many of the troubleshooting suggestions.

Recently, a friend of mine gave a talk at a local magnet school and brought her PC with her to demonstrate some multimedia examples for the students, via a projector. The PC worked fine at the school, but it went haywire when she got it home. First, it powered on fine but hung at the Windows splash screen. Then, when I turned it off and tried to turn it back on, nothing happened.

I consider myself to be quite savvy when it comes to troubleshooting PC's, but this one took me while to figure out. Clearly, something happened to the PC during transit, or at least that was my educated guess. I thought I'd take this opportunity to run through some troubleshooting techniques for both novice and advanced users that get stuck in a similar situation, with a PC that either won't power on, or won't boot. Maybe you just built a system and were expecting it to boot up, or maybe you relocated a PC that was previously working, like my friend. Or maybe, your PC just stopped working one day. These tips might help.

Here are some things to look for if your PC won't power on:

• Check the power cord and outlet.
• Check the power supply's connector to the motherboard. Disconnect and reconnect to be sure its firmly connected.

• Check the power supply. If you can test it in another PC, try it. Axion Technologies sent along the following graphic to illustrate one way of testing whether or not an ATX power supply is functional:
  

• Check the power switch on the PC's case and make sure it's properly connected to the motherboard. Try shorting the jumper pins that the switch uses to power on the PC. If that works, the switch is bad.

• Make sure the motherboard surface is not making contact with the metal case (except at its mounting points). Take the motherboard and power supply out of the case and place them on a non-conductive surface (wooden table, etc.). If it boots, something was probably shorting out in the case.

And if your PC powers on but gives you a blank screen (won't boot), here are some tips:

• Make sure all of the cards, the CPU, and the RAM, are properly seated. Remove them and reinsert them to be sure.
  

• Remove all non-essential components and disconnect non-essential cables (including IDE, floppy, etc.). All you should need to reach the initial boot screen (memory count, etc.) are: the motherboard, CPU, RAM, power supply, and graphics card. If it boots, start adding components one at a time, and boot up each time. When the system won't boot, you've found your faulty (or incorrectly installed or incompatible) component.

• Buy a POST (power on self test) diagnostic card. POST cards can tell you why the system is hanging up during the the boot-up. SysOpt used to sell one of these, but you can get one at http://store.yahoo.net/binarygear/index.html.

Troubleshooting with a POST card.

Success!

In my friend's case, the problem was that the power supply connector had become slightly dislodged. Of course, because that's a simple thing, I didn't think of checking it until I had already run through lots of other possibilities.

Some of the above tips are, of course, common knowledge, but novices don't always think of everything, and experts sometimes overlook the simple possibilities. If all else fails, make a post to SysOpt's message board so others can offer even more tips.

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