Start a Conversation

This post is more than 5 years old

Solved!

Go to Solution

95964

January 15th, 2016 07:00

Problem with an old Office Dell computer

Hey guys :) first post here! Glad to be part of the community!

So my father has some of these old Dell office computers at his work that were purchased second hand and some of them aren't working at all. I was asked to provide some help and we managed to get most of them up and running besides this particular one. 

Long story short - when you plug the power cable into the PC the case fan spins for a very short time and the power LED blinks with a green light after which the computer is ready to go.

The problem with this particular computer is that when you plug the power into the computer the CPU fan starts spinning and the power LED starts blinking with an orange light and never stops. Pressing the power button has zero effect. The PSU of the computer was replaces but the same problem persists (the PSU works normally on the other computers). All problematic capacitors were replaced on the motherboard (which fixed this particular issue with the other computers) but this still had no effect whatsoever. 

The computer was tested with its bare minimum parts stripped from any storage drives, RAM and anything else but still fails to boot to BIOS or do anything. 

My question is - is this a known issue and what steps would be good to determine the cause of the problem? 

Sadly I do not know the exact model of the computer but I do have some photos of it which you can find here:

http://i.imgur.com/2yUTOhj.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/8ezNGWq.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/nhT3H2c.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/9wivdXr.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/hImHJIc.jpg

Feel free to ask for any additional information if needed! 

Thank you in advance! 

Cap'

8 Wizard

 • 

47K Posts

January 15th, 2016 10:00

This is an Optiplex GX280 SFF.  Regulatory Model DHP

http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/product-support/product/optiplex-gx280/manuals

Ship date: November 30, 2004   Country: Denmark

The model is written around the ring on the power button.

The behavior is that of a board with Bad Caps and bad power supply.

 

 

January 17th, 2016 23:00

Thanks for the detailed and informative answer! The Motherboard turned out to be the cause of the problem despite the new capacitors on it. We swapped the motherboard with another one from the other computers and everything worked fine. Thank you! :) 

No Events found!

Top