Turn it on . . Nothing!!!!

I have a PC that does a similar thing. Its been doing it for months. Every time I shut it off it takes me about 5 goes to turn it on. I have to kick it sometimes (one of those old problems I can't be assed to fix - spare PC anyway)

I digress...Least he has the data now. Does it still show the HP splash? Any errors? Does kind of sound like a bad hard drive if its getting past the POST (Power On Self Test). Guess it could be RAM or video card if not that.

If he's not a tech-head get him to take it to a decent PC shop. Otherwise he can start pulling bits out and putting them back in. Things like this can often be caused by bad connections.

S

This may be a very daft question, please remember I'm not techy at all, just pulling ideas out of the air.
Could it be a dying battery?
I asked him if he'd changed it as I had noticed in the last couple of days his emails are slightly out of whack. If we were emailing and replying fast, his emails would fall into the folder behind the one he was answering, if you get what I mean. It was as if his clock was suddenly a few minutes out. It was just a thought.
As for the rest, he checked all that was suggested and found nothing.
It did stay at the HP screen as before, yes.
He's going to have to take it in somewhere.
Thanks for all the help, this is a great forum.

Depends on the motherboard i'd say, but yeah that could do it. Not sure if you can even replace them these days? I've never had the same motherboard in long enough to have ever had to replace one!



Yeah it's good isn't it? I've not been here very long (and I rarely get much time to post), but nice to have a forum with no name calling / flaming / 'you n0000b' posts etc. Very refreshing

S

thanks for your posts.

the problem could be a simple hardware issue.

when he opended the cpu casing most likelihood is that he didn't fix the IDE cables for hardisk correctly or they are lose. or the Floopy drive isn't fixed correctly and that's why he has to press F1. let him check to see if he's fixed all the IDE cables for all the drive correctly.
secondly the proble could be with BIOS. tell him to check his BIOs if its configured to see the the hard disk it could be that its not able to detect the harddisk.

Lastly it could be that the problem is with POST [power on self test] and this is associated with the BIOS or may be the "noise" he kept hearing would have been that something stuck on the motherboard so it somehow "short" it.

Lastly tell him to remove each hardware component from the pc and let him boot it up by that he'll know which hardare has a problem. it could be even the motherboard

The noise your son heard before was the sound of your sons hard drive starting to fail. You better ghost that drive to another drive, and you will be ok.

I thought I should post the results of this as it might come in handy for someone else who searches with the same symptoms.
Coincidentally on the very same day as the last post - June 9th - it happened again.
On a trip down to visit, we decided to try to solve it. I had mentioned a drive fitness test you can download and run, this we did and his drive seemed ok. So we opened it up and had a look inside. (Now, when I say "WE" I mean my husband and I, two very UNTECHY people, only doing what we have done in the past for my old computer.)
Jamie's computer is one of those compact towers, everything was terribly crammed in. We put in a new battery and cleaned the dust out, after taking it half apart to get to the cpu fan. There was a lot of dust, but when we started it up, still open, the noise was worse but definitely coming from the fan. We could see it struggling to turn, going slow then faster. We bought a new fan and now it works fine, and quietly.
Thanks again to all for the help.

time to get a new computer i guess.... you can buy barebone computers for supper cheap now.