The computer won't turn on by itself.
The computer won't turn on by itself.
My grandpa has a very old computer from the late 2000s that uses AMD chips and is an Athlon model. It seems broken for years now, so it won't turn on or show any screen even after trying to start. The fans still spin and the CD drives still open and close, but the hard drive is completely dead. I tried swapping out the CMOS battery because it was old and dead, but that didn't work. I haven't tried shorting the terminals with a coin yet. Even if you plug in an old computer to see what happens, nothing shows up on the monitor not even on a command line screen. I don't know if the power supply is sending too much voltage or if the motherboard is fried. Since I can't find out the exact model of the CPU or motherboard, I might be able to look it up tomorrow. Any help would be really great because right now I have no idea what to do about this mess.
It only came with one ram stick. I tried moving slots and taking it out, but nothing worked. And yes, I checked the cmos battery and used the jumper pins to reset bios, yet nothing happened. But I forgot to unplug the broken hard drive and check if that was causing it not to start up properly. Also, I think the cd drives won't be the issue since they are empty, but I'll try just in case.
oh yeah and by the way if someone ever sees this again, the problem was the power supply. It was bouncing between about 5 volts and about 18 volts. I swapped out the part and it would turn on for a second but then crash right away. I even tried to boot into windows once, and it blue screened immediately, so i'm pretty sure the cpu or chipset or gpu (which is built right into the motherboard) has completely fried from all that crazy voltage.