Sony Vaio Desktop

[Lostman]

So a co-worker bought a Sony Vaio desktop computer. He says it's not powering up. I tell him to bring it in and I'll look at it. Mind you, I can't do much to it at work and really have to wait to dig into it when I get home.

But here's the deal from what I can tell now.

I took off the side panel and pluged it into the wall. When I try to turn it on the fans spin for a milisecond and stop. It does this every 3 or 4 seconds. The mobo light is on, but it's not powering on.

I guess it's a bad powersupply. I'll be able to check that when I get home. But if it's a bad PS, would the mobo light come on? Would the fans even try to spin?

It's a cheap power supply and I think it's only rated at 275w for a p4 with dvd burner, cd rom, 1 hard drive, a GF4 MX 440 and vid capture card.

Anybody have a problem with something like this where the PS looks bad but still trys to kick on?

 

[CrashAbbott]

YEs!!

I have an ASUS cuv4XXX machine that has the exact same issues,, I thought the power supply was toast ,, so I got a chief Pws unit and threw it in,, no go,, but got the standby LED on the MOBO lighting up,,

as this is an ATX,, even with load,, the fans did not kick in,, on I went,,

so then I thought,, well maybe the video card ,, pulled it out and swapped it,, no go,, changed the ram,, no go,, took the mobo out of the case and rebuilt externally,, no go,,

my conclusion,, MOBO= DED!

cheers,

 

[Lostman]

That's my second thought. If it's not the PS then the only other thing would be the mobo. If it was the vid card, memory or cpu I would at least see the fans spin up or get some sort of display, or get beep codes. But nothing. Just the fans trying to kick on every few seconds.

 

[Inaris]

You can get a PS tester for under $30 and they will tell you for sure if the PS is bad or not. All you need is a multimeter to test the outputs and that will give you what you need.

I have a similar problem with a Gigabyte board. Only when I found the problem, it was from a small piece of solder that was a little longer then the rest on the PCI bus making contact with my case. Made a nice burn mark too...

 

[CrashAbbott]

Sorry,

hope you have a warranty,, sony is usually pretty good,,

they are especially sensitive about their vaio's as they still seem to be stalling on taking a larger piece of the pc market,,(from my dealings with a vaio laptop that had a video screen issue,, sony reps were excellent with their service for me - but the warranty was still valid on it *phew*)

cheers,

 

[Lostman]

You can get a PS tester for under $30 and they will tell you for sure if the PS is bad or not. All you need is a multimeter to test the outputs and that will give you what you need.

I have a similar problem with a Gigabyte board. Only when I found the problem, it was from a small piece of solder that was a little longer then the rest on the PCI bus making contact with my case. Made a nice burn mark too...

I have a multimeter, but have never used it. Can you give me an idea of how to test a PS with a multimeter?

 

[Inaris]

In conjunction with a power supply tester, you are checking the output voltages on the specific leads. This will tell you whether the PS is dead or not. I do not remember off hand what the pins are, but the outputs are +/- 12V and +/- 5V. The testers usually have an LED on them to show power, but sometimes one of the specific leads will be bad and that can be a problem.
You have to get a pin-out diagram to identify the specific leads and then using a ground and a (hot) lead, you test the voltage on it. There is a variance of like =/- .5v on most of them. The better the PS the less variance on the lead.

 

[Lostman]

Last question. I've always built AMD systems, but this rig is a P4. The power supply has the regular ATX connector to the mobo, but then it has this 4 pronged (2x2) connector that plugs into the board. What is this? The board has 2 spots for this, but only 1 is used.

I need to replace this PS but need to see if that is needed or not. My Thermaltake PS for my rig came with it, but another PS didn't.

 

[Inaris]

It's the 12v CPU power. Not sure what the two spots are for, ussually there is just one. This is needed, cause without it, the CPU won't run...
Who made the board for this anyway?

 

[Lostman]

I don't know. It has a sis chipset (something like that, only looket at it for a sec).

When I plugged in my test PS to the board without that part plugged in it booted fine. No error beeps or anything.

Do all new PS's come with this now?