Steve said:

Another possibility is a bad/loose connector to the "soft power" pins on
the motherboard. On ATX-powered PCs, the power switch doesn't turn on
the power supply; it asks the power supply to turn itself on (which is
why the power switch uses two little 24-or-so wires to the motherboard
instead of the 18-or-larger wires that run between AT-style power
switches and the power supply).

-------------------------------------------------

I just went through this with an old Dell Dimension P133 PC. The problem was
the connection from the on/off switch to the motherboard at the pin/plug
connector on the motherboard. By jiggling the wires at this spot I could get
the PC to power on/power off at random. The plug was fully seated and the
pins were fine (not broken or bent). There were no problems with loose wires
in the plug. I scraped the contact pins a bit with pliers and _very
slightly_ bent them a bit to make better contact with the plug then reseated
the plug a couple times. Haven't had a single problem since.

Lou Cook
Northwest Textbook Depository

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *