Saturday, 11 July 2009

Cold start

I bought myself my first desktop ever: a Dell Studio XPS, and had it delivered earlier in the week. It's reasonably well specced (Core I7, 6 GB RAM, Radeon 4850), but I'm just in the process of logging my first support call for it:
The computer fails to start when cold. Switching the power on results in the fans spinning up, the power button maintaining a yellow LED lite as opposed to white, and POST not launching. After waiting 30 seconds or so, and shutting the computer down by holding down the power key for 5 seconds, it is possible to power it up again and have it boot normally.
The amusing part from my point of view is I've seen this problem on another model of machine, in 1999. Care to hazard a guess as to the cause in that instance? (It's not year 2000 related)

Answer will be in a follow up post...
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4 comments:

  1. Joshua Smyth11 July 2009 at 13:10

    I've seen this problem before, while I don't know the exact cause, its something to do with the power supply?

    ReplyDelete
  2. joem11 July 2009 at 16:13

    Was it one of those old diesel cars that needs to be plugged in during the winter?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anders Hällzon11 July 2009 at 21:29

    Oh, I've heard of a variant of this one. Warming up the computer caused some metal part to bend, disconnecting a short circuit. Ergo, the computer had to be warm before starting up properly.

    ReplyDelete
  4. droid factorial12 July 2009 at 02:17

    You need more magic.

    ReplyDelete