>The Dells my clients have bought over the years have generally been pretty good.
>
>One client bought a batch of Dimension 5150s in 2006, all their power supplies have died and been replaced. In those cases, the computer won't start at all.
>
>If you have problems serious enough that the computer won't start to boot Windows:
>
>1. Try booting from a LiveCD such as Knoppix. If that won't work, most likely you do have a hardware problem
>
>2. You may have bad RAM memory in the first GB. If your RAM is in 2 or more banks, remove the first bank completely and replace it with the second. Try booting with the bare minimum of (hopefully good) RAM.
>
>3. You can test RAM with MemTest86+ (bootable CD): http://www.memtest.org/
>
>4. Simplify the hardware: unplug all exterior connections except power, keyboard and monitor. Remove all expansion cards except for video if that's what's being used. Although, if the computer also has integrated video you could plug the monitor into that and remove the add-on card. Disconnect unnecessary internal devices. The ultimate test, if nothing else works, is to disconnect all internal devices except the CD drive (i.e. disconnect the hard drive) and see if you can boot Knoppix.


Thanks for the info, Al. I still need to gather some willpower to start doing this, the only reason I bought a Dell in the first place was that I did not want to deal with these issues of fixing computers, heck, I still did not gather enough willpower to look behind the computer for Dell's number to see if I still have guarantee, that lazy am I :)