Emachines 3220 dead mobo - very unusual problem

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Fezar
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Hi, here is the story, recently came back off holiday and tried to boot up my desktop, and it is DEAD, its an old (about 6 years old) emachines 3220 pc which has been very reliable, i.e. its a load of rubbish thrown together by emachines but i can usually revive it. Its plugged into a surge protector power pack connected to the mains for about 50 weeks a year but due to the rain and inevitable storms, to protect my hardware, namely the wireless g router, from electrostatic damage I turned the surge pack supply off, so the pc speakers, printer, wireless router, monitor and desktop unit have no power.

9 Days later, tried to power up and it is DEAD. Ripped cover off and checked the cover switch, its been getting loose and not a very positive connection. Took fascia off and the button cover and pressed the button mechanism which had not broke, but does not fix problem. Test PSU, take apart and check for damage (burning) which shouldn't have been there as it had not been on for over a week and its fine. Then I noticed that a green led light comes on on the motherboard when power is supplied to the PSU, so that shows that mobo and PSU are in tact?

So try to clear bios settings by removing CMOS battery shorting terminals, still nothing, then play about with BIOS jumper and still nothing. A similar problem like this happened before which I believe was caused by the CMOS battery being really old, and unplugging the base unit let is slowly lose its charge, plugging it in for one day fixed it last time, but this time it did nothing and when I removed the battery PC did not boot. I thought it could boot without CMOS battery?

When I say dead I mean nothing, no CPU fan HDD, absolutely nothing the only sign of life is the green led on mobo when PSU is plugged in and definitely no POST

The only thing I can think of may be a dead CMOS battery or a partly fried motherboard, but what i can't understand is how this could happen if its was turned off, so I am guessing battery, until i get a new one, could it be anything else?

It has a secondary PCI nvidia graphics card which I fitted along with and additional 1 Gb of RAM

It really seems like some kind of bios issue to me...

Thanks for your assistance in advance!

Tom
rich220383
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Hi Tom,

Did you ever resolve your issue with the eMachines PC? I am having the exact same problem.

Thanks

Richard
edwin
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Open case, check for bad capacitors, see here how they look:
http://www.badcaps.net

If you happen to have a Bestec 250W power supply in there, replace both the supply and the board. Those babies blow everything up.
edwin/evasive

Do not assume anything

System error, strike any user to continue...
Fezar
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Thanks for showing interest!

although its been some time since i dumped that PC, in retrospect it did appear that the most likely failure was the capacitors. My advice to Richard would be to read up at badcaps.net as it appears to be the most optimistic and simplest fix.

raybay at http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic82793.html gave some similar advice.

Tom
edwin
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i have currently 3 boards waiting for a recap. this problem is far more widespread than thought originally, not only do we have the faulty made capacitors, there's another category of really really cheap capacitors that are manufactured badly and have had no qc at all. That category (the usage implied by the beancounters in the motherboard companies) shows up on boards as recent as the P4VM890 from Asrock and I haven't checked my current board but I fear the worst (that's a P4VM900 of only a few months old).

I'm not badmouthing Asrock, after all they are pretty decent boards for their price, but beware of going el cheapo and expecting your machine to last more than 5-6 years. It's not going to happen.

Even big Intel has a badcaps lemon board, it is sold as a whitebox board here and there, if you want I can give you the model, but have to look that one up.
edwin/evasive

Do not assume anything

System error, strike any user to continue...
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