So.. Here's my series of insanely unfortunate events...


I have had this machine for three years - never a problem besides the fact that the fan? something always ran and made a noise when it was on. I have an T2685 emachine..

It's finals week and I have 5 days left until the end of this semester.We needed to unplug the router to take it to school - fine. we unplug it - we plug it back it and the net didn't pop up so I rebooted it to refresh it. I walk away - net works on my mac - great who cares about the desktop. A day passes and I need to make a dvd my mom. I go I try to turn on the PC because to my surprise for the first time in 3 years it's OFF. It won't turn on. Eventually it does.. only to die during the making of said DVD. So.. I deal with it today.

It won't turn on.. OK fine it's the power supply or a bad switch. I go buy a new power supply a half hour away at comp usa. $41.99 later the thing now does this - The power light turns on (great I'm stoked!!) then the CPU fan kicks over for ONE rotation and it all goes quiet but the blue power light stays on. bizzarrro.

So.. I am like humm it's a bad switch.I mess with the switch wires - I pull the three mini wires for the switch off of the motherboard.. I undo the front cover and try to push button manual start the thing. No love. I now can't get the three mini wires back the way the came EXACTLY so I can't replicate the "computer stall"

So.. I say what do I really need from this hunk of bolts? I need 2 papers of it to work with this week because it's FINALS WEEK. So.. i attempt to take the hard drive out. The only "spare" pc I have here is a 1998 HP pavillion. This is real cute. So I try to load my 160 gig Windows XP hard drive into this rediculous piece of garbage with 64mb ram and *gasp* it starts up but won't load the hard drive because the machine is so outdated and HDS aren't backwards compatable?? I give up on the hard drive idea - I reload the hard drive into the PC. The switch wires are in some random ass order.. The new power supply doesn't start. All I can think of now is that I burnt my motherboard? Please tell me no because this is too huge a project during finals week and this is the one fix I havn't done to a computer.

I have said at least 15 times this semester that I need to buy an external firewire drive. Techie people are the worst at backing up because we spend so much time preaching to you people to do it we never actually do it ourselves. I kept saying - I'm going to buy a drive and I was just torn between ebay and guitar center prices. SO.. When I thought it was the power supply I was like sweet - pop the new puppy & I'm straight - no data loss. beautiful. But it still stalled. How the hell does a computer stall this is the first time I've ever seen this one ratation power up fail bs.

My guesses are the processor, the cpu fan, the fact I didn't kick it enough??

I hit the power button now - with the new power supply and NOTHING happens. no lights, no rotations, no spins.. the power supply goes 'ehh' once and dies.

I am now on the way to the store to get a hard drive enclosure to get to the files I need for tomrrow for class. I am buying a firewire harddrive with my giftcard and I'm going to try to back up what I can from the hard drive...

Any ideas??

So how do you expect it to turn on if the switch isn't hooked up right !!?

Thats what i was wondering too! I think you should get the switch working first, then move on from there.

I guess I wasn't clear.

before I messed with the switch - the switch was the way it came from the FACTORY and when I turned it on it would turn on do one rotation and stall.

So thats irrelevant.

It didnt work when the switch was normal.
Now I just cant get it back.

I think you have cpu/motherboard issues ,maybe !!.
Also did you remove all non-essential pci card and cdrom floppy drive and try to boot machine .try another video card ect ect ,if you have more than one stick of ram remove all but one .process of elimation !

A quick tip:
If the fan ain't turnin'
the chip ain't runnin'.

No offense, but that tip isn't one of the smartest things i have heard. A cpu fan might not turn and the chip will still be running if: the fan is broken, the fan has something blocking the fins, the fan came disconnected, the cpu temp diode is malfunctioning, the cpu fan was disabled in the bios, or the cpu fan connection is not recieving enough voltage to name a few. So saying if your fan isnt spinning your processor is not running is not a valid arguement alone.

However, on the post, it is very likely a bad motherboard or cpu, but it is very hard if not impossible to determine which one it is exactly without testing the parts with known good ones.

The CPU has protection against overheating by observing fan's rpms.
If rpms go below certan limit some CPUs underclock them selfs to reduce heating.
If the rpms go to 0 then the bios shuts system down emidiately. So, if it ain't turnin' it ain't runnin'.

True for some cpu's not all,I toasted a few older AMD's !! and a Pll & Plll will run with no fan, as will a lot of CPU's in different situations .

In the old days, maybe. I had 486 that didn't require any cooling whatsoever, yet it refused to work without working fan. I know so because it was on for several days with heatsink and fan hanging on a fan's wires, far away from the chip. But todays CPUs cores melt within seconds without cooling. It's not a matter of heat as it is a matter of downscaled size of the CPUs structure. (the smaller the diameter of the wire, the less power you need to fry it)