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piece of garbage with 64mb ram and *gasp* it starts up but won't load the hard drive because the machine is so outdated and HDS aren't backwards compatable??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??