Fitz

As described in my earlier post, I managed to get my hand-me-down Dell Dimension 8400 desktop working after a little tinkering and a lot of reading. I installed Ubuntu 7.10 and was up and running for a good week.

But, alas, my poor computer was destined for yet another crippling problem. One evening as I read the news, the cpu usage maxed out, and the computer was unresponsive. I believe Firefox was the only application open. Regardless, it was under a very light load.

After turning the computer off, I waited a few seconds, and then pushed the power button. Instead of booting from my Ubuntu partition, Grub presented me with a command line. I tried manually booting from the hard drive with no luck.

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After reading all sorts of problem descriptions and solutions on various forums, I’ve finally fixed my hand-me-down Dell Dimension 8400 desktop box.

When I first got it, I couldn’t even get it to turn on. After pressing the power button, it gave a few beeps, started an orange blinking with the power light, and refused to do anything else. Some people with the same problem had to replace the motherboard, the power supply, or the memory. Some still don’t have a working computer.

As for me, I unplugged all of the devices from the power supply, removed the memory sticks, and then put it all back together. Something along the way did the trick — I suspect it was removing and re-inserting the memory, but I’m not certain.

Now my box is up and running with Ubuntu 7.10!Leave a comment if you’ve had a similar problem with your Dell — I know there are a lot of you guys out there. Maybe you can post some other solutions and ideas here to help out…

Update: According to the Dell manual, there are 4 lights on the back of the tower labeled A, B, C, and D. If the A and B lights are orange, but the C and D lights are green, it could mean that the memory isn’t recognized and that you need to take out the memory sticks and put them back in again. This sounds like it could have been my problem.