lancec2c30 said:
okay I have said this like three times. nothing happpens, no fans come on, no hard drive spins up, no cdrom drives spin up. The power supply doesnt come on. You hit the on button or try to turn the computer on manually and it does nothing. Absolutley nothing!!
No need to get in a huff, only trying to help sharing some anecdotal experiences ;\
Did you bother to try any of the possibilities such as hitting the reset button after power? Remove all the cards and drives?? Reseat all connctions, wiggle the 20 pin, check board grounds??? Try plug it into another power circuit? There's a myriad of possibilities which might mimic a burned mobo. Often something as mundane as a disconnected/damaged pc speaker or cpu hs-fan can prevent boot.
We know nothing happens when you hit the power switch, which is why the other suggestions were proferred. Why not try them systematically? I wouldnt automatically assume anything without trying to pinpoint the diagnosis.
As previously mentioned, I've encountered 2 situations where boot only worked with BOTH reset and power buttons pushed. Cant explain it, but it worked: power switch only, and exactly same response as yours. Also one case where a fried modem would prevent boot-simple removal of each card might show something. Even remove the vga.
Something as simple as power surge or brownout may have damaged any component (phone lines notoriously dirty can hurt a modem and you'd never know it), and until you remove the bad one, you'll never know which one may be at fault. Removal of memory, cpu should elicit bios beeps, as should vga removal. Failure of beeps, and certainty it is not a ground or psu problem, usually indicates bad motherboard. If removal of memory results in beep, its the ram. If removal of cpu beeps, its the chip. If removal of vga beeps, its probably the card or agp slot. You've got to try one by one logically. Run memtest on the ram, put the cpu in a test mobo, take the board to a mom-n-pop shop for test (a local shop here charges $10 to test carry-in board/cpu)
Good luck.