Way back in 2002, I picked up a Shuttle SN41G2 for free from a friend who didn’t like it. This little system happily churned away for six years happily, with only one little problem. After a couple of years, as the system got older it took longer and longer for the system to turn on when I pushed the power button. My solution to this problem was to just leave it on all the time, which worked well, except for the cooling fan, which finally started to make odd sounds. I was eyeing up a new gaming machine anyways, so I bought a brand new computer, and put the old one aside after transferring the data.
Fast forward to last week. I had ordered a replacement power supply from some small computer company in Richmond, BC, and picked up a new cooling fan locally. I removed the old power supply and fan, replaced them both, and powered up the new system. It worked like a charm, the old OS still fired up, no errors. I formatted it, reinstalled Win2K (which it had been running for 6 years), applied 76 security patches, and had just about got it ready for my kids to use. Then things got ugly.
As I was restarting after installing a virtual cd-drive program, I heard an odd noise. This computer has two hard drives in it, the 40BG that came with the system, and a quantam fireball 60GB that I had added to it. The fireball spins up with a distinctive sound, and I heard it trying to spin up four or five times while windows was booting up. I thought a hard restart might fix the problem, but instead, the computer turned off, and now I can’t turn it back on.
After I got over being really pissed off at it, I opened up the case, and tried to see if I could get it to boot. I unplugged everything non-essential, no luck. I unplugged my radeon 9600se that I had upgraded it with a couple years back, no luck. I unplugged everything that I could, and it still won’t power up. But there is some power coming from my power supply, as the led on the motherboard is lit up. The other odd thing I noticed was that if I unplugged and replugged the power supply and pushed the power button is that my fans will start spinning up for about a quarter of a second. The lights on the front don’t flash however.
So, is this computer hosed? It’s a pretty old system, and I’m not really interested in putting more money into it if my mainboard is the issue. On the other hand, if it is just my new power supply being defective, I’m willing to call up the company I bought it from and see if I can get a replacement. I’m flat out of ideas, so I appeal to the teeming millions … can you help me?