Pwr Outage comp won't start. Need to finish dissertation this week! please help!

[kcbennet89]

 I am a masters student working on my dissertation and I had a major computer issue this morning. I have a Dell Vostro 410 that after a power outage won't turn on or do anything. I really need advice on what steps to take. and an outside repair man is not an option due to an extremely limited budget. I have taken it apart, reset the power supply and it still does nothing. I took off the main power connected from power supply to motherboard, then connected a jumper from pin 15 to 16, then plugged in. The power supply powered up, as well as the hard drive. i then tested the voltages of the other pins and all seems operational. Is there someone able to help?

[DaveLembke]

I'd borrow a known good power supply from a friend and see if the system behaves? Power supplies can be bad and still appear to run, they are just not able to run the computer.

[kyle_engineer]

kcbennet89

Did this get solved for you in the chat room? Don't remember if it was the power switch or not. Anyway, if it didn't get solved, I'd go with what Dave recommended. I've had plenty of PSUs that have seemed totally workable and still not gotten the PC on for whatever reason.

Also consider that all of the power for the PC comes from the PSU, so it's going to get the most stress and is exposed to the greatest risk electrically speaking. I'd say about 70+% of the time I've had odd issues like that the PSU has been the culprit. 20% of the time it's been problems with the graphics card, so you could also try removing the GPU and booting up without it to see if that does anything. The rest of the time it's been damage to multiple components, and there wasn't a single piece that could be blamed.

[DaveLembke]

20% of the time it's been problems with the graphics card, so you could also try removing the GPU and booting up without it to see if that does anything.

Just wanted to state that removing a perfectly good video card from a weak power supply, could get the system to behave on integrated video that has much lower power demands. I wouldnt rule out power supply if the system behaves with the video card removed. If you have a video card to remove and it runs, without the more powerful video card, I wouldnt throw that video card away thinking that it is bad, when the PSU could still be the root cause. *Swapping the PSU with a known good PSU is the easiest test that will not alter driver settings such as swapping video cards would create. However if you dont have a PSU to borrow handy and need this system up and running you might be able to limp along on system with integrated graphics and a weak power supply to get your work done, however i would be saving your work very frequently and saving it to a USB pen/thumb drive so that if the power supply should degrade further you can take this thumb drive to different computer and pick up where you left off with your project without being in a situation where your data is now on the hard drive and you need to work on it and its not as easily transferrable to another computer to continue from. *If you dont have a thumb drive you could always use a free online cloud storage solution in which you can continue on your work from any other computer with internet and the necessary software to open and continue on projects.