Other Upgrading mum's pc - not booting, desperate for help

Possibly the battery is buggered - maybe the standby current from the psu has keep it working on its last legs up until now, just providing enough current to keep the battery in a workable state. unplugging the pc to work on it (i hope you did!) may have run the battery down flat enough for it to finally die.

 

if the board is 9 yrs old, then it probably is the battery

 

Well Confusis does make a good argument there - enough to give me hope of a simple fix. I'll get on ebay and get some replacements - C2032's aren't they?

 

cr2032

 

Them's the ones. Just a pain I live 45mins from my mum's - gonna have to wait til next weekend now. Hope I didn't damage the switch when ripping off the front to get a look at it

 

Well I've put a new CMOS battery in and it hasn't made any difference.

If the computer has been shut down and is off it still takes the removal of the CMOS battery and the reconnection of the power for it to turn on again.

Any more guesses?

 

have you tried a different power supply? failing that, then maybe the cmos chip itself is faulty

 

Already swapped the psu over from another case and it's the same with both. Other case turns on as normal.

Is the cmos chip replaceable?

 

if it's in a socket then yes maybe, but some were soldered to the board which is a bit more of a faff

obvoiusly if it is removable, your first step is to google for a replacement for your board.

 

Once you're back in Windows a bios update might be the classic kill-or-cure. If there's something a little wrong with your bios chips then this will likely kill it. If the data on the chips has gotten bad then this should cure it.

For a horrible kludge (I love working on old computers) you could remove the battery permanently and grab a free utility to set the date and time from the internet at each startup.