My mothers friend brought me an older HP yesterday because she bought a laptop. She bought the laptop because the HP quit. My gut is that it got struck by lightening while she was on vacation.
It is a 2000 or 2001 HP pavilion model (per her purchasing date) It came loaded with Win Millennium and was upgraded to HP shortly after. It has a celeron inside based on the sticker on the case. I can not verify this though as I have not pulled the cooler. The cooler is an aftermarket cooler master (has a cooler master fan on it) but still looks like a stock one.
I tried to power it on but got nothing. So I take out the PSU to trouble shoot that first. I jumped the green and black wire and the PSU came on. Checked with a multimeter and all the pins are getting the right voltage.
Checked the power switch for continuity when pressed. Its good.
Then I plugged it all back up just to make sure it was not a loose connection. The this time upon plugging in the power cable to the back of the PSU the cpu fan came on. The computer did not boot up however. Just the CPU fan came on. The HDD did not spin up or anything.
I reseated the ram, checked all the caps, took out all add on cards (network and 56k modem) and unhooked the Optical and HDD. Still no boot up.
I take the PSU out and hook up a spare I have. The CPU fan does not come on this time. I hook the original PSU up and the CPU fan still did not come back on. I tried this several more times and could not duplicate the previous fan running anomaly.
I took the HDD out and threw it in my linux box and it could not see the HDD. I checked the jumper and it was in the right spot. I tried it again in my main rig with a ubuntu live cd and still could not detect the HDD. It did spin up both times though. Its not much of a loss. She had no photos on it and only used the box to browse the net and play casino games.
With the odd power issues and the HDD being bad I am guessing that this box got hit by lightening.
Did I miss anything?