XPS 420 Screen Became Blank Without Showing BIOS

HERE

<ADMIN NOTE: Broken link has been removed / replaced from this post by Dell>

is the troubleshooting section of the manual.  Are you getting any diagnostic beeps when you power on?  What is the status of the power light on the front panel?  Those are listed in the troubleshooting section and may help you.

One suggestion, with the PC powered off, reseat the memory modules and video card, to see if that helps.  If you can get it to power on and run the POST, press F12 and run the hardware diagnostics to see if anything shows up.

Looking at your specs, your video card jumps out. THE 8800 is a rather old card and i would suggest that it is failing. Try running the Dell diagnostics on it. Your symptoms do tend to favor a failing video card.

Thank you so much for your replies, guys. I think that the problem is not due to my Dell SE198WFP 19" Widescreen Flat Panel Monitor, originally bundled with my XPS 420 purchase. It is because I managed to access the monitor setting, by pressing the monitor buttons.

1. Yes, there is something funny regarding the status of the power light on the front panel. For about 8 attempts of every 10 boot up of my XPS 420, none of the lights lights up. For the remaining 2 attempts, it shows Light 1, 2 and 3 (Another failure has occurred.) light up. Occasionally, it shows Light 2 and 3 light up (A possible floppy drive or hard drive failure has occurred.). The light sequences makes not much sence to me. If my hard disk was supposed to faulty, removing hard disk would allow the computer to boot into BIOS at the every least. No matter what, I still cannot access BIOS.

2. Diagnostic beeps? There is not any. Once I switched on the computer, the computer will load, without any sound from the speaker. The screen remained blank as always. Once in a while, the XPS Miniview displayed "No Display Device Found", before loading into Windows SideShow. Again, this display is not consistent enough to be displayed for every reboot.  

3. Running the Dell diagnostics is definitely not an option, as BIOS has to be loaded before we can select the Dell diagnostics. Since I cannot even see BIOS at all, there is no chance of me using Dell diagnostics.

4. Could the problem be caused by insufficient power supply from PSU, or faulty PSU? Note that I have never overclocked any component in the computer.

5. I too agree with you guys that the video card is faulty and I cannot repair it. I just take the easy way of buying a video card to replace it. However, I afraid that after spending huge amount of the money buying the card and installing it, the problem still cannot be solved. Then, the money would be wasted for no reason. That is why I have to be really sure that video card is the culprit, before proceeding to buy the replacement. IN other words, I should not jump into any hasty conclusion.

I hope that you all can understand my predicament. Is there any other way to fully confirm the video card as the culprit?

Thank you for your information. My XPS 420 has always been the pride of my life. I really love to see it running fine once again.

short of trying the card in another system there is not. What you can try is finding a retailer with a good return policy. Also you can just pick a real cheap card and see if the video comes  on

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Hi,

I have a similar problem with my old 420 that I use as a home server. What was the problem finally? Did you solved the matter?