PC switches on and may boot straight away or boot after 6+ hours :(

[bodminman]

Good morning all,

 

We are having issues with the Stone PCs we purchased some 5 years ago where they will not boot up when powered on. No POST screen, just hear the fans going and that's it. If you leave them, they will eventually boot after 6+ hours.

 

Sometimes they will boot up straight away though so it's a real pita.

 

Running PC Check doesn't flag anything up.

 

We have 120 of the same machine and this is now happening on 6 of them.

 

Please help.

 

Cheers

[synaesthesia]

My inclination would be power supply fault. Pull open the PSU of a machine you know has done it and see if you can see any bulging caps. If you do, plan to replace the power supplies in all 120 or replace the machines.

[Passat1983ICTech]

I no thins is a long shot but have you change the power supply a I no we have had a few witch I have change the power supply and they have boot up first time but it could be the mother board as well it worth a go :-)

[bodminman]

Thanks. I have a spare PSIU on the way for a known PSU issue but will try it in one of these machines first.

[Passat1983ICTech]

let us know if it dose work

[stevewill6]

Check the caps on the motherboard. We had issues with our stone PCs a few years ago.

[synaesthesia]

If there's any dodgy caps on the mainboard I would be *hugely* surprised. Stone tend to use decent motherboard manufacturers, mostly Intel OEM I believe. Whilst it's highly possible in a PSU and something you'd need to soak up yourself, if there's anything dodgy on the mainboard you can take them straight back to Stone regardless of warranty status.

[newpersn]

We had this with stone computers with Intel DH61WW motherboards. Sometimes resetting the CPU/Ram will help or as above its a PSU or motherboard fault.

[Zourous]

I had similar symptoms on a Fujitsu model PC and it turned out to be the PSU. You can try a test on the 6 most troublesome PC's by turning them off with the button on the PSU or pull the power lead if it doesn't have a button. If you do this as the last action of the day, I bet the PC's will boot properly the next day assuming this is the issue. We found PC's started doing this intermittantly to begin with and then over time it gets worst to the point where it is pretty much all the time.

[ricki]

Have had students sending magic packets in the past check wake on LAN is disabled in bios and os

[NB9457]

Even if you do find a solution, it sounds like you could end up fire fighting and wasting time, money and resource fixing machines that are now fairly old.

 

If the 6 have failed in a short time period, maybe take this as a sign of things to come and start planning now, express your concerns and recommend they seek new PCs, even 30 at a time, then at least as other machines start to drop off, you'll have a few spares.

 

If money is the issue @ICTDirect_Dave has some Dell i3 PCs Refurbed for around £125 each with warranty.

[Passat1983ICTech]

check capacitors on a motherboard see what they are like

[synaesthesia]

Have had students sending magic packets in the past check wake on LAN is disabled in bios and os

 

What?? Most useful feature that PCs have and you want it turned off? If students are causing any issues with it (and I can't see why turning them on would be an issue...) then surely there are other issues with your network.

[bodminman]

We had this with stone computers with Intel DH61WW motherboards. Sometimes resetting the CPU/Ram will help or as above its a PSU or motherboard fault.

 

This is the exact board we have in these machines.

[newpersn]

This is the exact board we have in these machines.

 

I will add: We only had faults with the first batch of these. We got 2 other computer rooms with same board and they been fine.

[Passat1983ICTech]

might be the be the bois need a update on this

[bodminman]

might be the be the bois need a update on this

 

They were all updated over the waster hola.

[ricki]

Have you reimage machines with an image from a machine that does not have the problem or change the hard drive from an ok machine into a machine with problem Richard

[synaesthesia]

Not sure how that would help a PC that won't even POST....

[ricki]

Have had two issues in past one with power buttons sticking and one with a virus or hard drive problem. The one with the hard drive problem would not boot for ages due to drive not passing tests from bios when first started. They were a bad batch of hard drives

[ricki]

The other was a bad batch of power switches that caused machines to turn on and off randomly

[Passat1983ICTech]

could be the gpu on the board take the power to the board and the ram and the hard out and take the cmos battery out and clear the bois as well see what happens

[bodminman]

On one of the most problematic machines I have just opened it up and:

 

Replaced CMOS Battery - Same issue

Replaced the RAM - Same issue

Replaced the HDD - Same issue

Swapped over the CPU - Same issue

 

Only things left are the PSU and the motherboard.

[ricki]

Usb ports aren't damaged are they

[bodminman]

Usb ports aren't damaged are they

 

Not that I can see.