heat sink fan comes on for 2 seconds, stops

[karen4984]

i have a computer, i'm afraid i'm not too sure of the specs. i
believe the cpu is intel. the computer would not start at all when
pushing the front power button. not even a click. after flipping the
back power switch to off and back to on, the front power button would
cause the computer to come on for a couple seconds, see a black screen
with "windows loading" or some such on it, and then turn off. pushing
the front power button would not do anything after that until the back
power switch was flipped again, and then the front power button would
give the 2 seconds on again, et cetera.

i replaced the atx power supply, and this is what happens now:

after plugging in the power supply and flipping the back switch to on,
_without touching the front power button_, the computer powers up.
with the case open, i can see that the fan on the heat sink comes on
for about two seconds and then stops. i _believe_ i hear sounds from
the hard drive as well. there is NO activity on the screen
whatsoever. pushing the front power button has no effect, nor does
holding it down. the green power light on the front lights
continuously. the red light does not appear. the only way to get it
out of this state is to turn the back power switch back to off.

i removed three expansion cards (one modem, two network cards), and
tried powering up with the same result. i have reseated the ram.

if anyone has any advice, i would greatly appreciate it. i really
don't know much about electronics, and not familiar with the proper
vocabulary for much of what is inside the computer.

thank you,
-k

[karen4984]

ok, i have done a little research, and i have identified many of the components. here's what (i think) i know:

motherboard
fastfame 3slap

This socket 370 motherbaord uses the Intel i815EP chipset. It features 6 PCI,1 CNR, AGP 4x, 3 dimm slots, and AC'97. The board supports 66/11/133 MHz FSB, and UDMA 33/66/100. It comes with 2MB Flash EEPROM, Award BIOS.

PC100 SDRAM
IBM 01K1138

Matrox 32MB DDR AGP (256B Dual-head) video card
G45+MDHA32DB

hope that helps someone let me know where to start.

thanks,
-k

[breadtrk]

Do you hear any beeps? Try taking the RAM sticks out one at a time and restarting. I would even try reseating the heatsink on the CPU, but that is an advanced task, or rather it looks like it would be an advanced task for someone with your skill level. You can do it and you can find illustrations on how to do it by searching google for cpu heatsink replacement. If none of the above work and you have changed the powersupply, looks to me like it is time to retire that machine and look at getting something newer. Your motherboard is probably fried or the CPU is gone. Most times no beep and no boot at all means the BIOS is not seeing the CPU. You can take it to a shop to have the RAM and CPU checked, your CPU and even your Motherboard can be replaced, but would it be worth it?

No offense intented but your PC is pretty well obsolete now and fixing this will just cause the next weakest link break and so forth. Sorry