its a desktop computer, a few years old but with constantly updated parts, save the motherboard, processor, and graphics card (after my newer one mysteriously conked out). i think the monitor may be dying as well as it has been flickering fairly frequently and occasionally dying for a few minutes at a time; the only reason i'm including this information is in case it has some relevance to the main problem of my dead computer.
recently it has been hanging at the "you're computer is now shutting down" screen in WinXP, resulting in my manually shutting it down by holding down the power button on the front. when i start up the computer afterwards, it has twice (at least) gone to a black screen rather than going to the colorful "WindowsXP" screen at startup, with no further response to key presses. restarting the computer again worked the other time i remember it happening, but this last time i held down the power button for the second time to turn it off, and when i pushed it again to turn it back on nothing happened.
i tried pushing the power button and the restart button, holding each or both, and was finally able to get a second or two response (as if it were starting up) before it died again by turning off the power at the power splitter thing and then turning it on again before trying to push the power buttton again.
there are a crapload of things drawing power from that splitter (including another splitter) but its been like that for years without incident so i dont think that is the cause of the problem. a year ago or less the power supply on the thing died, so we had to replace it, and we've had multiple harddrive and cd burner deaths over the years, but nothing on this magnitude.
so, my question is, how do i bring this thing back to life?
Originally Posted by jephree 