This has the stink of french-fried motherboard all over it. Look the 
board over for blown capacitors, especially close to the CPU socket. 
Caps will ooze goop through the top when they are bad. Second thing is 
to strip the machine down to the bare essentials (CPU, mainboard, RAM, 
and power supply) and see if the board will power up, much less POST. 
That means no hard drives, CD drives, etcetera. Change the power supply 
out for a known good and see if that impacts the issue. Friendly 
reminder: do each change separately (such as changing out a part). If 
you do two changes at once, you won't know which one helped (or hindered).

chipo chika wrote:
> A collegue has been complaining about her PC hanging after every boot up
> in the morning. She called me this morning to her office to sort this
> mess and  I found the PC was hanging and after sometime the screen went
> blank but I could hear the fans and the LED's were on. It failed to
> reset and power off until I force it through the switch at the back. It
> also failed to power up twice and only did so on the third attempt.
> Could this be bad memory chip or graphics card? The MOBO is a mecury and
> the graphics card is embedded. Pentium 4 256 MB.
>   

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