Dell Dimension 4600i mini-tower hardware issues

I have owned three Dimension 2400s, a Dimension E520, and presently use an XPS 410.  All of them flash yellow momentarily when the power button is pressed.  Current designs have the power supply energized as long as they are plugged into an active AC power source.  When the button is pushed, the motherboard signals the power supply to switch on the main power to the board.  As this usually takes about a quarter of a second it is often possible to see a yellow indicator just before the voltage on the main supply comes up.  I would not consider this abnormal, and do not think it is an indicator of impending failure.

With regard to the chipset, I've never had the heat sink off of one.  My own view of this is that if thermal paste was found when I removed it, I would clean off the old paste and use new when I put the heat sink back on.  Since the heatsink on the chipset is usually passive, this is seldom disturbed during a system cleaning, and I wouldn't recommend removing it.  If it isn't broken, it isn't wise to try to fix it.

If your PSU is extremely plugged with dust, and the case is not riveted shut, you can most likely take the can apart for cleaning.  Every machine I've dealt with, however, responded well to being blown out with compressed air while the case remained fastened shut.  Given the possibility of messing something up when the PSU case is opened, I would not open the PSU unless it has so much dust that the compressed air doesn't get it out.

If you were able to get both your optical drives to boot I would say you were fortunate.  The Dimension 4600 gives the SATA ports priority over IDE ports with regard to bootable drives.  Had you installed a SATA hard drive along with your IDE drive, you would have found that the SATA drive would have been the only drive that would automatically boot up.  Given that situation I am surprised you could boot automatically from the IDE optical drive given you have a SATA optical drive installed.  Have you tried pressing F12 after starting the computer to see if you could select either optical drive?  Don't forget that there must be a bootable disk in the drive in order to select it.  Another thought is that most DVD drives will also read and boot from CDs.  I have run across one or two that would not, and occasionally found one that would not let either of two drives boot if I left it attached to the system.

JackShack,

Thank you for your reply.  :emotion-2:

As for the Intel chipset, I had a Gateway ELP 500L-2 mini-tower that ultimately died.  Problem was, the chipset was found blued-out when the heat-sink was removed for inspection, so a possible reason for burning out three psu's (original and replacement, and a spare psu) was found.  As this unit was made in August 2000, maybe it was time, anyway.

Hence the question re heat thermal compound paste, yes or no? 

No paste was found on the Gateway chipset heatsink, only a thin clear tape of some kind.  I do not know what type of tape this is.

As for the ROM drives, maybe I can fool the BIOS into accepting the CD-ROM as default boot device in the following way:

• Remove the DVD-ROM drive and the backup IDE drive temporarily (so as to not have the drive letter of the backup EIDE drive change to another letter).
• Check to see if the CD-ROM is now the bootable device.
• Re-attach one device at a time, DVD first, restart system from cold boot.

• Report my findings back here when done.

The only reason for attempting this method is to use a CD-ROM cd as a bootable program device and have the DVD available to read a disc image made with DVD-ROM media should I ever need to restore to images made some time ago.

I will try the F12 method when BIOS is starting, so I may not need to do the above.

The tape you found on the Gateway chipset was likely some sort of thermal transfer pad.  This is common during manufacture since applying thermal paste takes longer to do.  Dell frequently uses a thermal pad on the processor rather than a thermal paste.  The pad contains a wax based thermal compound that melts as the processor heats up so that all the "valleys" in the heat spreader get filled in.  The same advice applys; if you take it apart, clean it and apply fresh thermal compound.  Most of these approaches work fine for many years provided they are not disturbed.

If you detach the SATA drive I would expect that the IDE CD ROM drive would boot a disk just fine, assuming that it is connected to the master connector on the IDE ribbon.  It will be interesting to learn how things work out, so let us know.