No more power..

So.. Here's my series of insanely unfortunate events...


I have had this machine for three years - never a problem besides the fact that the fan? something always ran and made a noise when it was on. I have an T2685 emachine..

It was finals week and I had 5 days left until the end of this semester.We needed to unplug the router to take it to school - fine. we unplug it - we plug it back it and the net didn't pop up so I rebooted it to refresh it. I walk away - net works on my mac - great who cares about the desktop. A day passes and I need to make a dvd my mom. I go I try to turn on the PC because to my surprise for the first time in 3 years it's OFF. It won't turn on. Eventually it does.. only to die during the making of said DVD. So.. I deal with it today.

It won't turn on.. OK fine it's the power supply or a bad switch. I go buy a new power supply a half hour away at comp usa. $41.99 later the thing now does this - The power light turns on (great I'm stoked!!) then the CPU fan kicks over for ONE rotation and it all goes quiet but the blue power light stays on. bizzarrro.

So.. I am like humm it's a bad switch.I mess with the switch wires - I pull the three mini wires for the switch off of the motherboard.. I undo the front cover and try to push button manual start the thing. No love. I now can't get the three mini wires back the way the came EXACTLY so I can't replicate the "computer stall"

So.. I say what do I really need from this hunk of bolts? I need 2 papers of it to work with this week because it's FINALS WEEK. So.. i attempt to take the hard drive out. The only "spare" pc I have here is a 1998 HP pavillion. This is real cute. So I try to load my 160 gig Windows XP hard drive into this rediculous piece of garbage with 64mb ram and *gasp* it starts up but won't load the hard drive because the machine is so outdated and HDS aren't backwards compatable?? I give up on the hard drive idea - I reload the hard drive into the PC. The switch wires are in some random ass order.. The new power supply doesn't start. All I can think of now is that I burnt my motherboard? Please tell me no because this is too huge a project during finals week and this is the one fix I havn't done to a computer.

How the hell does a computer stall this is the first time I've ever seen this one ratation power up fail bs.

My guesses are the motherboard, the cpu fan, the fact I didn't kick it enough??

I hit the power button now - with the new power supply and NOTHING happens. no lights, no rotations, no spins.. the power supply goes 'ehh' once and dies.

( I now cant get the switch wires the way they were so now it wont even turn over once

Any ideas??
Many thanks in advance.
Angel

Please try to watch your language there...

It's most likely the motherboard in this case. Usually when it doesn't power on, it's the power supply or motherboard (excluding any of the simpler doings like make sure cable is plugged into power outlet, etc.).

Take a look at your motherboard and look at the capacitors (these are the little cylinders you see sticking up on the board). Are any of them swollen or look like they "popped" before? If any of those are damaged, a new motherboard is definitely needed. Even in the case when it doesn't look damaged, you might still need to replace it in your case. See if you can return it to the store if it's not the motherboard.

The hard drive didn't work probably because of the different chipset drivers. Try not to swap hard drives like this. Don't make a hard drive bootable on a different machine.