Not sure which forum to put this in so here we go!

I have a 7 year old Gateway system that has just died. It sat around (unused for 2.5 years and I brought it back to life with a hard drive and reformat. It worked great for 2 weeks and then I just shut it off and 1 hour later went to boot it and nothing... that's not 100% true. When I turn it on the fan starts up, the DVD drive turns on and then nothing. The screen never even comes on it just stays in standby mode. To check if it was the screen I unplugged it and a box comes up saying that the connection is lost.

My question is.. what is most likely the culprit. Is it motherboard, cpu or other and how can I check.

The specs are

intel 2.4gz northwood

512 ram

6800 gs

intel 865 mobo

Please don't tell me to just buy another one. It is myu second computer used by the wifey. I want to do this as cheap as possible and i'd basically have to replace everyhting short of the box to upgrade, agp and all!

Thanks

Just a hunch, but if that new HD was sata, perhaps the battery(CMOS) is dead and it is not recognizing the new hard drive. To check, go into the bios and make sure the appropriate sata is enabled. If that works, your battery is probably dead

He can't get into the BIOS, looks like.

Check all your connections and re-seat all the parts. Sounds like the MB though.

Here's the short list.
PSU
CPU
RAM
Motherboard
Video Card
Not having a way to isolate and test each part you just end up spending money on a box that is not worth it.
When you can buy a new box for $299.99 putting money into one that's 7 years old is just throwing money away.

Having said that you might be able to connect a speaker to the motherboard and listen to the post codes. The lintel web site should have this information for your board.

That might give you some idea what is bad in the system.