Hey dudes. Another help me plz thread

Anyway, I'm currently sitting infront of an old Packard Bell machine. I've googled around and I can't find much about anything to be fair

So this box died on my parents a while ago, and they donated it to me - if I can fix it I can sell it .

The initial problem was that there was no power. So I took a look at it when my parents still owned it, fiddled around (reseating etc) and managed to get her to boot up. The last time I used this computer, it was working - BUT not every time. Sometimes it wouldn't boot, then sometimes as if by magic it would.

So I went and bought a new PSU thinking "maybe it's just a duff PSU". Today, I have installed that to no avail. The old PSU does not work either.

However, I noticed a new symptom today. On the mobo (D33006) there is an orange light. If I plug everything in and press the power button - this orange light just turns on. It won't turn off unless you take the power out (Switching the PSU switch to O) and it takes a couple seconds to die (About 4 seconds).

I've reseated everything countless times, and removed everything I can in turn - HDD, CDROM, Floppy, Modem (that's how old it is...) and nothing. It won't boot! However, it used to.

There's no post beeps nothing.

I'm hoping it's not dead, is there anything left I can try?

Oh, I tried taking the CMos battery out too but I haven't tried leaving it out for a long time. I'll do that tonight!

I doubt the battery will do something, but you never know. At this point you're probably look at bad RAM, a bad CPU, or the motherboard, assuming you've unplugged all the peripherals in an attempt to boot. With how old the box is, that doesn't make it worth salvaging. You'll spend more on the parts to get it working than you'd probably get selling it. I'd recommend to cut your losses... pull the parts that you can use (PSU, CD-ROM... that's probably about it) and toss the rest. Or recycle it or something. Sell it to China so they can mine it for gold.

Haha, I haven't looked at this box for a couple of days - despite the fact it's sat right infront of my telly.

I'll have a dig in there, if it's dead I'll just flog it for spares and repairs. Infact, depending on how old the Ram is you can usually get quite a bit in my local part-ex store; because older ram is getting hard to come by!

Aint worth shit dude.

I'd throw it in the bin, but that's just my minimalist non-consumerist mentality speaking

Aint worth shit dude.

I'd throw it in the bin, but that's just my minimalist non-consumerist mentality speaking

Wouldn't a non-consumerist attitude involve repairing old crap instead of throwing it out?

But yeah, if you can't fix it without too much extra effort (like searching for antique parts etc) just let it go...unless that's your sort of thing of course.

I went by a friend of my brother's yesterday. His old pc died and he wanted to install his HD into his gf's equally old PC. They had spent an entire Saturday trying to figure it out they told me (he and my bro). I just removed the cap on the HD to set it to slave and plugged it in on the slave end of the IDE cable of his gf's HD, and MAGIC. Well at least in their eyes anyway.

I spent more time putting the HD's back in places with a screwdriver than actually 'fixing' the problem. Sigh. Though I guess being able to figure out IDE cables and settings is kind of becoming old man knowledge anyway, the hardware counterpart of DOS if you will.

Yes but i'm dual-class. Minimalist / Non-Consumerist.

hah... bullshit artist. Any yes, I agree about IDE being old-man material. I remember installing ISA cards. I remember having to manually set hardware interrupt (IRQ) settings. Those days were hell.

Some soundcards required manual IRQ settings as well i believe. At least when configuring games.

Don't forget DMA and the ubiquitous "Soundblaster Compatible" option.

Are you old enough to remember configuring your video card? When they finally came out with VESA compatible, it was a godsend. Actually, just like sound before they came out with Soundblaster compatible. Such a pain in the ass. Thank you competitive marketplace for standardization. Competitive marketplace and government regulation.

Now let's standardize cellphone power charges and headphone jacks.

Already done Also, a lot of newer phones (esp smartphones) offer 3.5mm jacks for audio.

Haha, I can't really remember doing that, no. My (PC) gaming days started around that time or after. It's possible that I had to do it trial-and-error style a few times, but if I did I don't remember. Most of my sound setting adventures were based on hunches and half guesses anyway. Looking back, it almost felt like you were playing a minigame before playing the actual game, trying to get it to work properly.

I tend to mess around a lot in Dosbox to play older games so I still mess with settings like that from time to time, and instead of being frustrating it's almost nostalgic. Of course, the fact that a) you can work in a windows-based tool instead of using elaborate DOS commands do get around and b) if necessary you can find the proper settings for most game on this thing called the interweb which didn't exist for me for a long time, KINDA make it easier.

pfft, lightweight. If you've never played around in your autoexec.bat and config.sys, prioritizing module load order and trying to shoehorn drivers into high or upper memory, then you've never lived!

I remember how awesome it was to get a DOS boot floppy that gave you an extra 10KB of memory without sacrificing any drivers.