Dell Dimension 8300 Problems

[kupuni]

What I did: My hard drive died and when I cracked the case I noticed a row of 6 capacitors
along side of the heat sink that were puffy. You have to pull the heat sink and CPU to get the motherboard off the tray, which I did, and then replaced the capacitors. I put it back together with nothing but the motherboard and fan hooker up. When I turned it on I got 2 short beeps and the #4 diagnostic stayed yellow. I bought a motherboard on ebay that had the heat sink and CPU on it and when I hooked it up I got the same results as I got from the motherboard I thought I fixed. So, of course, after having read 50 responses referring to beep codes and diagnostic lights to no avail, is there anyone who can tell me what I'm doing wrong and what I need to do? Both boards have 1GB memory sticks and I've reseated them already.

 

[saint19]

Did you tried with another PSU, RAM or maybe another CPU?

 

[HugoStiglitz]

do you get the same beeps when you have NO ram as when you have ram in?

if so it sounds like the ram is stuffed.

 

[scout_03]

witch of the light stay yellow use the link to find what is causing the error http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/SYSTEMS/dim8300/en/om/M2972A02.pdf

 

[Raiddinn]

Only the one on the right yellow and the other 3 green is just a general something is screwed up error that doesn't point to any one particular cause, scout. It says so right in that link you posted.

If it was a RAM failure, another combination of diagnostic lights should be lit up instead of GGGY.

Anyway, OP, You have a decent combination of things available for testing, if it were me the next step I would do would be to try and do every possible combination of things with them and see if I could get a different result.

If you have 2+ RAM sticks, you could try just 1 in each of the slots on both motherboards and see if anything different would light up.

You could try both CPUs in the opposite board from where they are now.

Those are just for starters.

General errors tend to be hard to diagnose.

Also, I wouldn't be shocked to discover this was a PSU problem as it seems that this part was probably the same through every test. If it was the same in every test and the same problem existed in every test then it would make a lot of sense.

In general, I find that probably 2/3 - 3/4 of all problems where computers can't turn on are problems where people can fix it right away with a newer or higher quality PSU (or both).