Vostro 230 - Solid Amber Power Light

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Nothing connect to the PC.  Tried the cmos battery thick bu no luck.

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Did you disconnect the optical drive(s) too?  

Did you check that cable from power supply to motherboard is correctly connected?

Did you check that CPU power cable is correctly connected to the motherboard?

Did you remove all PCI cards, except video, and reseat the video card in its slot (assuming it has an add-in video card)?

If this system has an add-in video card, and also supports on-board graphics, you can remove the video card and connect the monitor to the on-board graphics output.

Remove all RAM modules except the one in slot 1.

Try resetting BIOS:

Power off and unplug

Press/hold power button for ~15 sec

Open the case and remove the motherboard

Press/hold power button for ~30 sec

Reinstall the battery (right-side-up!) and see if it boots with only mouse, monitor and keyboard connected.

Disconnect the two drives and the cable for the front usb ports.  Everything else is on the Motherboard.  No screen, no beeps.  Any other suggestions?

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I have had this exact problem with 5 Vostro 230s here in our business. It is not the power supply RAM or anything connected to the mainboard it IS the mainboard.  I feel that we will have more 230s failing soon.  We are very disappointed with the Vostro 230 here in the office.  I can only feel that Dell knows this to be an issue with these.  If I have seen 5 failures Dell surely has seen hundreds and hundreds.  It happens only days after the warranty expires.  I have purchased mainboards off ebay to repair ours so far at a $100 each.  Good luck,

PS  All the mainboards you find on ebay for the 230 are refurbs whick leads me to believe Dell has already replaced a bunch of these and sent them back to the board manufacturer who repaired them and dumped them onto the market.

greg_gourley

All of Dell's replacement parts are labeled *Refurbished*, even when they are new.

Bev.

shesagordie

I dont want to get into an arguement but thats not true.  I've been repairing and buying parts for Dell PCs for many many years.  Regardless it doesnt diminish the fact that these 230s are failing at a high rate.

I have the same problem with my Vostro 230. I replaced the motherboard as well, but did NOT fix the issue. I still have a solid amber light. Can someone help.

Thanks

Check all of the USB ports. If someone jammed one of the ports with a thumb drive it can break or bend the plastic part inside of the USB port and allow the pins to touch stuff it is not supposed to touch.  Changing the motherboard does not deal with the USB ports on the front.

USB ports on my Vostro 230 (pretty slim tower) are the tightest USB ports I've ever seen.  Took days of building up courage to push in a USB cable after being sure it was oriented correctly.  It wasn't easy, and I almost sprained my wrist to get the cable inserted!  A couple of insertions later, and they're still extra-tight.

That can lead to a problem.  If you're sure the cable should go in, and it doesn't go in one way, you might turn it over and try to push it in the other way.  But if it was right the first time -- but it didn't go in because it's extra-tight -- then it's going to be wrong when you try to push it in the other way.

And that's when the USB socket in the Vostro can get broken or bent, like SPNetworking suggested.

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I am not looking forward to troubleshooting a bad motherboard.  Sorry to hear these blow up; what a waste.  This one went online a year ago, has been running its E5800 CPU at 100% for about half the time, and so far so good.  But have to keep the data files backed up.  Maybe these are why Mr. Dell is getting out of the business.

I hope whomever is re-selling these boards knows about ESD (electrostatic discharge) protection procedures...

Is there a time limit on posting to a thread?  I still have Vostro 230s Failing at a very very hight rate compaired to our other Dell PCs