Computer turns on, but not to full power?

twonha

twonha

Well-known member
Rage3D Subscriber
My in-laws' PC is acting weird.

They brought it to me, and it acted like this: the machine turns on, but the cpu fan doesn't get to full power and pretty much nothing else happens. No post, no Windows, the only way to turn it off is to kill the PSU switch in the back.

Now, my first thought was that the PSU is dead or at least not giving enough power. So I switched it for one of mine. PC boots, no problem. To check, I put back the other PSU... And it boots, no issues at all. This is odd, right?!

It's done this a few times over the past two, three months. Sometimes it won't boot at all, but after opening it up and switching some stuff around, it works like a charm, for a week. Then it falls back into not booting.

Any ideas what this might be caused by, what to check first/second/third?
 
Pull out and reseat RAM. Any dust blow it out. Most likely bad RAM. If you had time enough time you could pull out all sticks but one(if there are 2 or more) and see which one is causing the issue. Or you can run a RAM test see if it throws any errors.
  • If it was GPU it probably wouldnt post at all ever, even after switching power supplies.
  • If it was a bad hard drive it would still post to bios.
  • You ruled out PSU.
One also thing to check is if your parents hook up a USB hub cause sometimes those can cause issues for when using cheaper units.
 
logical said:
Pull out and reseat RAM. Any dust blow it out. Most likely bad RAM. If you had time enough time you could pull out all sticks but one(if there are 2 or more) and see which one is causing the issue. Or you can run a RAM test see if it throws any errors.
  • If it was GPU it probably wouldnt post at all ever, even after switching power supplies.
  • If it was a bad hard drive it would still post to bios.
  • You ruled out PSU.
One also thing to check is if your parents hook up a USB hub cause sometimes those can cause issues for when using cheaper units.
Click to expand...

I've reseated RAM a few times too. Unfortunately it's just the one stick, and I don't have any others to test with. Plus, as it stands the PC boots. I'm currently running BurnInTest / PassMark on the memory. Had done that before, I don't really expect any issues.

I could check their USB hub. I know they use one, and they didn't bring it over, so if it's that, I couldn't replicate it at home anyway. :lol:
 
Could be the PSU is slowly giving out? Hence it being intermittent and working again after being powered down for awhile.
 
twonha said:
My in-laws' PC is acting weird.

They brought it to me, and it acted like this: the machine turns on, but the cpu fan doesn't get to full power and pretty much nothing else happens. No post, no Windows, the only way to turn it off is to kill the PSU switch in the back.

Now, my first thought was that the PSU is dead or at least not giving enough power. So I switched it for one of mine. PC boots, no problem. To check, I put back the other PSU... And it boots, no issues at all. This is odd, right?!

It's done this a few times over the past two, three months. Sometimes it won't boot at all, but after opening it up and switching some stuff around, it works like a charm, for a week. Then it falls back into not booting.

Any ideas what this might be caused by, what to check first/second/third?
Click to expand...

So, scenario where there is no power applied (standby) causes the system to start working again? Will it start working if you pull the plug from the wall, wait 5 minutes, then plug it back in again? (long enough for capacitors to discharge, etc.)

If so, then you have some BIOS setting issues. Might be that the BIOS battery is dead, so removing the power supply effectively resets everything to defaults.


Alternatively, maybe you have fans in the PSU , cpu, etc, that are clogged with dust, and not being able to spin up the MB doesn't allow real booting/power.
 
koralis said:
So, scenario where there is no power applied (standby) causes the system to start working again? Will it start working if you pull the plug from the wall, wait 5 minutes, then plug it back in again? (long enough for capacitors to discharge, etc.)

If so, then you have some BIOS setting issues. Might be that the BIOS battery is dead, so removing the power supply effectively resets everything to defaults.

Alternatively, maybe you have fans in the PSU , cpu, etc, that are clogged with dust, and not being able to spin up the MB doesn't allow real booting/power.
Click to expand...

There was no power applied when the PC was brought over, so that's not a sure thing either. Dust isn't it either, PC isn't old enough for there to be a big build-up of dust.

Any ideas on how to actually test if a usb hub is giving trouble? Just transfer files back and forth for a while?
 
I would just throw a new psu in there and call it a day man don't waste your time.
 
My first thought is that it's the PSU.

Just to make sure, pull up the Event Viewer and see what codes it's throwing.
 
twonha said:
There was no power applied when the PC was brought over, so that's not a sure thing either. Dust isn't it either, PC isn't old enough for there to be a big build-up of dust.

Any ideas on how to actually test if a usb hub is giving trouble? Just transfer files back and forth for a while?
Click to expand...


Nah just put all the **** they have on the hub and plug it in and try using some of those devices. Voltages sometimes get all flunky if the hub is ****.
 
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