Hey, I ran into a computer that a friend of mine had been hanging onto from an office he used to work at. He couldn't get it to work and another friend of his that tried to get it to work could not either. (btw, these are a few guys quite a bit older then me). Anyways, long story short, he dropped it off to me after I did a bit of computer work for him at his house. So now I have a computer that is most likely completely dead, but that I'd like to eitehr fix up or scrap and salvage parts. My question is, how should I go about testing out the hardware of the computer?

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forgot comp specs...from work, so brief, more detail later

old computer, '95 or so?

300w powersupply (what I'm hoping is dead, and the only problem), workstation specific powersupply?

intel mobo
1gb ram (I think anyways, 4 sticks covered with stuff)
2 scuzzy hdd
1 reg hdd
maxtor video card

I had a breif discussion with a hardware friend of mine to talked about testing the chips for current on the mobo, can anyone explain how to do that in detail? as well as anyother methods of testing out the hardware (specifically the power/motherboard)

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dual pentium pro (holy...OLD LOL) processors on the motherboard, forgot to mention

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Does the Computer power on? are there any audible beeps? (Does the Power Supply Fan turn on, does the light on the MoBo turn on "aka" flea light)

If Yes, are there any audible beeps?
Does the Processor Fan spin, do the drives spin up?

If No,
Replace Power Supply, and/or MoBo (Whichever is Cheaper to start with)

If power on (processor Fan spins) but no Video try reseating the video card (unless of course it is onboard then replace mobo). If after reseating and still no video, try another video card.
If still no video replace mobo.

If no beeps, and video works, check Bios for HDD being found correctly, also Memory being found correctly.

Hope this helps, sounds like a Power Supply if it is not turning on, but then again it could be the Mother Board

If it is the power supply take it out of the case and use the part numbers on it to order a new one.
If it is the Mother Board, make sure you order one that will work with the memory already in it, and the power supply.

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What Klass said is a good method, make sure there is power...make sure motherboard and fans are running, etc. Go step by step through everything that needs to fire up in order for the computer to work and do your best to check if each is working individually. If you have any parts that are compatible, if you get stuck by knowing the PSU is working and everything seems to be booting fine and then it jsut dies...or a similar scenario...you can swap out parts one by one to see if any one piece is causing the problem. HD and ram are common pieces that fail and could make a system crash upon booting. But

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First of all I would like to point out that if the system is really old, it is more likely to have 256Mb of RAM in 4 64Mb sticks than 1GB. Second, if even one of the RAM sticks is bad that can sometimes, depending on the motherboard, prevent a bootup. If you can rule out the motherboard as not being a problem and the motherboard receives power, to test the RAM, place only one stick in the machine at a time. This will not give you enough to work with, but if the computer boots at all and does a memory check the stick is fine. If it starts to boot then hangs, or doesn't boot, the RAM is bad.

~Viz

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Try to remove each item one at a time, for example, take out the sound card and then turn it on, if it still have problems, take out the pci modem next, if it still have problems, take out the next connected hardware such as cd-rom drives, pci cards, floppy disk drives and whatever you have in there, until you get to the bare video card itself, if it still have problems then use another video card and if that still have problems then I think that the computer is messed up.

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Thannks for the replies guys, when I get together enough free time I'll sit down and test things out.

Viz, thanks for the notice, I'm thinking it probably is 256mb of ram. I was surprised at the size of the sticks and how many were on it it, but looking at them again it probably isn't as much as I was hoping....

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