I have two Dell Vostro 430 tower computers – each one is about 11 years old, and they are each running Windows 10 with no problem. I use them to stream the internet to my two TVs.
One of them died. It simply would not power up. Here’s how I fixed it:
* I swapped video cards – that didn’t fix it. The problem continued after I swapped the video cards, so I knew that there was no problem with either video card.
* I put in a new CMOS battery. The computer now powered up, but it didn’t do anything. The power button was red, not blue, and the fan was very loud. But at least it now had power.
* I noticed that there were four memory slots. The computer had two memory sticks, so on a lark, I moved the two sticks to the other two slots. The computer now booted! I had to go into setup and set the date and time. After I did that, the computer worked fine. And the fan now ran quiet.
Conclusions:
* Evidently my CMOS battery was getting low, because when I put in a fresh battery, I started to get some activity on the computer.
* Either one (or both) of the memory slots were bad; or perhaps the tabs on one or both of the memory sticks were getting corroded, and when I removed and reinstalled the memory, it scraped them clean enough so that they now got a good connection.
At any rate, all is now well, and I didn’t have to spend a penny to fix it! (except for the CMOS battery).
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server
