The fan worked.  This is a good indicator that the power supply
is not the culprit.  I have only a little experience with
bad power supplies or short-circuited cases, but in all instances
nothing happens when the power switch is on, not even the fan.
I recommend the old brute force troubleshooting method. Strip
everything out except the motherboard, 2 simms, and the video card.
While your at it rotate the case at different angles and see if any
loose metal screws, etc fall out.  You don't want those touching
any soldered connections.
Connect only a known working keyboard (test your keyboard on a
friend's pc if you have to).  At the very least you should be able
to reach cmos setup.  If not, swap simms or video and try again.
If you succeed in booting, add a diskette drive and a boot floppy and
see if you can boot to A: in dos.  Add the hard disk, ram, sound card,
modems, etc one at a time and test to see if you can boot to dos.
I continue to use the diskette for this to prevent windows from loading
and uninstalling any missing plug and play cards.  If nothing seems to
help its time to take it to a professional.  I sometimes do that first!
Tom Turak

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Tuesday, February 29, 2000 10:52 AM

Before continuing with the story, my system's information:
        Pentium 166 MMX;
        First HD 10.2Gg;
        Secnd HD  2.5Gg;
        AmiBios from 95;
        48Mb of EDO-RAM;
        2 modems 33.600;
        SB 16 SoundCard;

The Story:
        Once upon a time two weeks ago, my computer didn't turned on. It
didn't even get to the BIOS or make any 'beep' sound. The fans worked and
the light on the front panel and in the HDD were on. Because the computer
didn't even entry POST, I thought the problem must be electrical (from the
energy supply) -- and I fixed one by one all of the power connections. It
still didn't worked (and without computer I couldn't write for advice
<g>), so I opened the Power Supply and looked in the wires to see if
someone was broken or not in place. It looked everything OK, so I blew
the dust, closed the P/S and turned it (the computer) on. To my surprise,
the computer worked fine.

        One week ago, the computer presented the same symptoms. I
performed the same steps, but get no response --

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