I built my mum a pc many moons ago,used for very basic things, mainly web, email and basic games like Scrabble. Yesterday she went to power up and all she gets us the power led comes on and no other activity. I've reset the CMOS, jumped the PSU (fires up), tried booting up with only 1 stick of ram and everything else disconnected but same thing, just the power led lights up. Tried with another PSU as well. Is it simply dead. If it matters it's a K9N NEO motherboard 8gb ram and I think it has either an X2 4600 or 6000+ CPU so yeh pretty old.
If it's an old system it could be the cmos battery may just need replacing, that can cause all sorts of problems if it's dead. I'm sure I have some still in a pack from when I had a similar problem with an old rig, I can sling one your way if you want?
I'll give that a try, pretty sure I have some new ones knocking about, thanks for the offer. I have some old gear to swap in should I need too.
Worth giving it a shot, I spent a while dismantling an old rig before trying that They do die though. Give me a shout if you can't find one, I have a spare stamp.
I think I have convinced my mum to go new. As above she doesn't use it for anything taxing at all but I'd like it to be at least a little nippy. What am I looking at for a budget non gaming build these days. I presume an APU would suit her fine.
Would a refurb do? - Dell refurbished Inspiron 3881 - £330 As for a new prebuilt new - Scan Ryzen 3 3200G - £470 Of course, those are the cheapest each has. Bump the spec, bump the price.
I'll build it myself. Was just looking for a psu, motherboard cpu and case really. Think I might have 8gb ddr3 ram knocking around. I have a 2500K as well but I'd like a new board to go with that which is impossible.
On board graphics will be more than fine, the hd4000 on my 3770 did that on my second rig perfectly fine so anything like that or newer will be adequate.
Ah, I misunderstood. Would this help? - £235 for a Ryzen 3 3200G, A320 mobo, 8GB DDR4, case & 500W PSU? (see the "frequently bought together" bit for case & psu)
If this was my PC and I had tried all the 'usuals', I would completely disassemble it, clean it to within an inch of its life, reapply thermal paste where needed and carefully rebuild.
Someone is selling a mini pc for £100 here that will work great. Good luck finding an APU as there are none. I spent two weeks fruitlessly looking before buying a SOC.
So for now I've decided to temporarily use one of my old boards to get the pc up and running. Thought this would be easy but no. Spent an hour getting the same FF error code on the motherboard display, switched sticks if ram multiple times in multiple slots, removed and checked the CPU, two power supplies and finally a different GPU. Reset the CMOS several times by removing the battery and by pressing the CMOS reset button, it's then I noticed that the jumper is missing from the CPU reset pins, I go and nick one from another board and fit it and hey presto it boots. A simple jumper stopped it booting...really. I remember borrowing a jumper to try and fix something else non computer related I must have not put it back, can't remember what the hell I was using it on now. Edit used the jumper in an Xbox I was trying to fix and it was still in there.
