eMachines blows hard. please help?

[benihana99]

Okay, a friend of mine made the mistake of buying an eMachines T2862. After a few years of use, it stopped turning on. Being the computer geek, he came to me. At first, i thought it was the PSU, but after replacing it with an Athena ATX-350W P4-12V, it didnt help. the only difference is was the mobo had a little light lit up on it. I'm thinking the mobo is fried. eMachines support gave no help as they offered a fixing kit for just under 200$. i wasnt about to pay that, so i came to my favorite collection of techno-wizards (Computer Forum) to ask:
WHAT THE HELL DO I DO?

i believe the mobo is an intel seabreeze 101776. it has 20+4 power, a Celeron D 2.66gHz, 2 IDE and one floppy connector, 3 PCI slots, and 2 DDR2 RAM slots. its a micro-atx I THINK, and its hooked up to the stock CD burner and a DVD-ROM drive from a similar model, along with 2 unknown IDE HDDs.

so, is there a similar mobo for cheap? i believe its a socket 478. also, will the new mobo and bios cause problems with WinXP? If i have to reinstall WinXP, i might as well get him a new comp. save some money and time down the line.

please help!

 

[twitchtwice]

You save the 200, put it towards a new computer.

You take the 2 diskdrives out for the new computer.

You save the PSU you just bought for the new computer.

You buy a case, some fans, a motherboard, cpu, graphics card,ram, and a harddrive if you need a new one for another 200-300 and then you call it a days work.

 

[Rickymadeja]

You save the 200, put it towards a new computer.

You take the 2 diskdrives out for the new computer.

You save the PSU you just bought for the new computer.

You buy a case, some fans, a motherboard, cpu, graphics card,ram, and a harddrive if you need a new one for another 200-300 and then you call it a days work.

I agree.
emachines really do blow.

 

[OvenMaster]

That Seabreeze motherboard is made by Intel. Even Intel can't have a 0% mobo failure rate.

You should have owned an eMachines with a Trigem motherboard, before they switched to FICs four years ago. Now, those blew, bigtime! And eMachines still uses cheapo OEM PSUs... when they crap out, they take the motherboard with them.

Anyone who owns an eMachines should replace the PSU as soon as the box is out of warranty. I did and have had no problems since.

 

[Gareth]

Indeed, my old emachines came with a 180w power supply for a Athlon XP 3000+, 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD, I replaced it with a 350w power supply immediately. The standard ones should be illegal to produce, lol.

 

[benihana99]

yes, emachines are terrible computers. at least now my friends have me to build them comps (i learned only half a year ago- seems like ages). i know the mobo has power because of the indicator light, but when i press the power button, nothing happens. this model is so poorly designed that i cannot get the front plate off or the hard drives out (kind of funny, i put the slave drive in myself). the only explanation i can have is that i installed an old 512mb RAM stick. it ran fine for about a month, then crapped out. i wonder if there is any other way, my friend is basically broke and cannot afford a whole new comp. maybe a low-budget one would be okay. if i can salvage the psu, the processor, the hard drives, and the RAM, that would be fine. he's not a gamer, so i can just buy a new mobo and toss in my old nvidia geforce2 mx/mx 400 on a pci slot and use that for video. the only problem is, i cant seem to find a good socket 478 mobo anywhere. the only one i found is a biostar (the mobo equivalent of emachines) and had some odd 24-pin power connector. im not buying another psu. if i can get a cheapo case and a cd burner, i think it would suffice. can anyone link me to a mobo with 2 ide connector, a 20 or 20+4 power connector, at least one pci slot, and a socket 478?

 

[The Good Guy]

eeiiiiaachaa. you've been far to hasty my friend. what makes you think it's the mobo? what you should do for your friend is use your own computer to test some off his hardware.
I'd say it has something to do with the power switch but you don't want to test that till you go through the basics.
he's not a gamer!? might i recommend you sell/trade all the hardware, including both psu's on craigslist. his computer could be bartered for as low as 100$.

 

[oscaryu1]

Indeed, my old emachines came with a 180w power supply for a Athlon XP 3000+, 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD, I replaced it with a 350w power supply immediately. The standard ones should be illegal to produce, lol.

Any prebuilt will be like that... I had a Celeron 2.4 come with a 250W... luckily it didn't crap out

Dell's also have PSUs like that.

 

[benihana99]

eeiiiiaachaa. you've been far to hasty my friend. what makes you think it's the mobo? what you should do for your friend is use your own computer to test some off his hardware.
I'd say it has something to do with the power switch but you don't want to test that till you go through the basics.
he's not a gamer!? might i recommend you sell/trade all the hardware, including both psu's on craigslist. his computer could be bartered for as low as 100$.

i want to test the other hardware, but im not sure i can isolate the problem. i suppose if i connected it to a different power button...
i'll try that and post my results later.

 

[benihana99]

okay. i disconnected everything but the mobo and fans. i wired a different but similar button in to the mobo. but nothing happened. i jumped the bios and everything. the mobo power light still remains on. something must fail between pressing the power button and the mobo booting up. but what could it be?

 

[oscaryu1]

Power switch? Try shorting the pins twice at a time.