Out of the blue, the machine appeared to have a stroke... and died. The system crashed and powered down. When I turned it back on, the power light blinked orange and all the drives were spinning and clicking, the network card light was blinking as well. No response on the monitor, blank screen. Sometimes when powered up, it goes through a cycle of drive activity then goes quiet, with light blinking orange. Always a blank screen on the monitor, not even a flicker. I moved the machine, and a week later powered it up again for the hell of it before i gutted it for usable parts. It came to life.. after a few minutes (literally) of clicking and spinning. I got the setup screen, went into the menu and made sure everything was set properly, restarted the computer and it worked for a day. I had to power it down and since it has refused to returned to life... only spinning and blinking.

Any suggestions?

I've seen this problem before with a couple machines. Normally, I manually pull the power cord from the back of the power supply, let it sit a couple minutes and plug it back in. Sometimes I may need to do it 5-10 times but mine will eventually come back to life. I havent had the time to sit and investigate why I have to manually unplug the cord from the back of my pc to get it up and running fine again but for now, it works for me. It's worth a shot at least to get it back up and running to get your data backed up to an external drive for when the machine never comes back to life. Hope this helps.

Thank you for the suggestion... but so far, no luck.

If you both are still looking for a solution for the orange blinking power light on a Dell 280 GX - try replacing the power supply. Replacing it with a known good one ought to do the trick. A bad power supply can be a real pain to diagnose, unless you swap it early on if you suspect it. They can be intermittent and/or eventually fail altogether.