Power Light Blinking Orange

You have enabled Standby on your computer. Although it is supposed to work with a desktop, in reality it is for laptops only.

1st, press and hold the power button (for about 5 seconds) This will completely power off your computer.

Then, after rebooting, go into Control Panel and modify your power settings to disable standby.

Charles,
Tag # 6VMY111

Dimension 8200, Bios A03
1.8 ghz P4
256 mb Ram
80 gb HD
NVidia GEForce3 TI200
Dell M991 monitor
Samsung 308b DVD/CDRW combo
Telephony modem
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound (4161 beta driver)
Altec Lansing ADA995 (1BT)
Windows XP Home
(Multibooted with Win98, Win2000, OS/2, Linux)
Roxio Easy CDCreator 5.1.0.104 (platinum)
Office XP Pro (retail)
Power DVD 4 (retail upgrade)
Norton SystemWorks 2002 (retail)

It's not on stand by, I set it to never go on standby. I can unplug the power, put it back in, press the power button and it will just blink orange, that's why it's more complicated than the standby.

Jose Perez

Nice answer!
Read the manual!

Why don't you step away from your normal personality and stop being a jerk.

I have the same problem - I came back to the computer (which does use standby) and found it impossible to get the machine to run -- pressing and holding the power button just made the CD-RW light blink one, made the fan spin for about a second, and made the yellow/orange lightr behind the power button blink.  None of the diagnostic lights on the back went on. 

I called tech support and was told to try unplugging all drives and cards and seeing if that made any difference.  The tech said that if this did not make a difference, the problem was probably the power supply, and I would need to change it.

I tried unplugging CD drives and hard drive, and also reseating power cables, and that made no difference.  So now I will try replacing power supply.  (Machine is an 8200 bought with 1 year wty, and is now about 1 1/2 years old.)

Incidentally, the tech said that it should be ok to use a computer store power supply rather than one from Dell -- apparently Dell is no longer using non-standard pin outs on its motherboards and power supplies as it did in the 98-2000 time frame.  Also, in trying to figure this out, I read that the power supplies send a "power Ok" signal that the MB must receive in order to initalize.  So that seems to be why you get a blinking light, but no boot, if the power supply fails.

Please let this board know if changing the power supply solves the problem.

I have the same problem. I have a DELL GX 280 desktop and the power goes off after 10 minutes. The power button starts to blink orange. I have checked standby, hibernation, and all of my power management settings and turned them all off. Still having a problem.

I went through my event logs and saw nothing that would indicate an abnormal shutdown due to a hardware or software problem.

Does Dell have any diag software that I can run to find my machine state? If so, where can I get it.