Green 766m wont post

i've recently acquired a green area 51m 766 with a 3ghz p4 and i think it came with 1gb of memory. i got it in as is condition. i go to power it up, and its nothing but a black screen with the fan blowing at full speed. seems as though it wont post. shame as its very clean and has very few marks.

i take all the covers off and give it a good dusting, same result. i put in new memory and reseat the graphics card. same thing. i try a myriad of other processors i have from 2.8ghz to 3.4ghz. nope. tried reseating the cmos battery, hard resetting, nothing changes. safe to say i'm stumped. i've looked all over the board and dont see or smell anything blown. i'm half convinced its the bios chip but i've no way to test that theory.

i would love to get a working board, but the only place i can find is selling one 'on sale' for $200+, which is about triple what i got my whole unit for. so it looks like i'm stuck trying to find out how to fix the board its already got. any tips or hints on working on this model alienware?

 

You've tried all I can think of. Removing the HDD, optical drive, memory and place back one stick at a time, battery, check voltage of cmos battery, try external monitor etc.

Do the status lights do anything?

 

it didnt come with an hdd or caddy. i've tried removing everything. nothing worked. i did not try an external monitor though. i'll give it a quick poke. theres one blue light above the keyboard that is on the instant you hit the power button but then goes away after a second or two. only other lights are the plugged in/power lights.

 

it did not display on external monitor either. one thing i noticed while hooking the monitor up is that the rear alien head lights never come on. could it be something screen cable related?

 

It should work even without the screen using an external monitor. As a stretch, you could try measuring voltage from the power supply using a multi-meter but it's looking like the motherboard might be toast. Again, make sure the CMOS battery has voltage too, I've had an HP that wouldn't POST if the battery died.

 

so i gave it a new cmos battery with no effect. tried a hard reset. same thing. put the original processor back in and reseated the graphics card and different memory and another hard reset. and now it works. no idea what one thing solved it.