Unusual Computer Failure

[dusty]

At least it was unusual for me. This is my new Dell computer. I turned it on this morning and it started to come alive and then shut down. A couple seconds later, the fans began turning again, then they shut down. This continued until I cut power. There was no indication that it ever tried to boot.

Where to from here. I disconnected power to the hard drive and power to the DVD. No change in symptoms.

Logged in here with the other computer. Now I'm off looking for assistance from Dell (customer service).

[Beave2012]

Check your heat sink for accumulated dust. If it gets clogged it will insulate it and cause it to overheat. Then it does an emergency shutdown and sends a signal to the fans to turn on max speed. Clean that out with compressed air and should be good if that's the issue.

2nd option is the thermal paste that connects your processor to the heat sink has failed and needs to be reapplied.

3rd is your hard drive failed and you can rule this out by booting from a DVD or USB drive rather than the hard drive. But this is unlikely as it doesn't just show that it cannot find a bootable drive.

4th ram is the issue, but that generally sends you to the blue screen of death rather than shut down.

Just what I would check

[dusty]

Brand new computer. Little chance of dust or clogging. Have had no indications of problems in the short time that I have had it (about three weeks).

[garys]

Dell customer service will likely have some ideas of what to do to get to the source of the problem. Hopefully they get back to you soon and figure it out.

[dusty]

Dell customer service will likely have some ideas of what to do to get to the source of the problem. Hopefully they get back to you soon and figure it out.

You are dead on. I called Dell Support Assist (actually emailed them first) and got a "call back" about about an hour latter. I had already systematically disconnected power from each hardware device to determine if one of them was causing the problem. No luck there but it did reduce the troubleshooting time when I got to Dell Customer Support.

Problem Solved. Well, almost.

I am now waiting for 16GB of ram (two sticks). The advice was to pull the ram and then reinstall one stick at a time. Doing so revealed that I had a bad stick of ram. I have two sticks coming from Dell now. Should be here on Monday. It was advised that ram should be replaced in pairs. What they had was faster than what was in the computer; thus two sticks rather then just one to replace the bad one.

Every day - I learn a new trick or two. I have had ram failures before but never one that exhibited itself like this.

Actually, I don't sense any degradation in performance with only the remaining 16GB of memory. I just may run this way for awhile to see what happens. What I am doing right now uses very little ram. It is when I have several apps running at the same time that the reduction in memory may exhibit itself.