Dimension 4600 DOA

Hi.
Lightning (not lightening) hit the telephone pole next to my house on Monday. My wife's 4600 and a Linksys router seem to be the only casualties.

When power on button is pushed the front panel light turns amber, no ABCD lights in back, and 1 little green LED on the MB is lit. I bought a 350W PS thinking it had fried but still get the same results. New PS is still installed.

Per Dell tech support I tried powering up with video card, modem, all memory, and cables to HD, CD, and floppy removed. Same results, amber light on front, little green light on MB and nothing else, no beeps, no ABCD lights.

Dell tech support is very confident the MB is toast. I have ordered a new one.

What is the likelihood the processor is damaged?

Not having removed one since the days of 486-66's, how difficult is it to remove since I will have to put it on the new MB?

And finally, if the new motherboard indeed fixes my problems, will Windows XP Home give me grief about it?

Thanks!

--Mike--

 

Pool of Knowledge Closed for Cleaning

We're here to help, Mike.

This is what I imagine you ran into yesterday when you replaced that MB.
The CPU heatsink wasn't too firmly attached to the CPU and the whole thing came out easily. The CPU was surely not damaged in any way by the power surge and went easily into the socket on the new MB. You may want to purchase and apply some new heat sink compound to the top of the CPU though.

In order to keep XP from going BS and denying you access to the product you already own, you probably A)Inserted your XP install disk into the CD-ROM, B)Powered up and went into BIOS by hitting F2, C)Made sure the boot order was CD-ROM first D)Rebooted and did a repair install of XP. You probably also applied SP2 and all subsequent updates and maybe even updated the BIOS.

The motherboard was fried, the CPU was OK, and XP was beaten into believing the MB was the same one.

If you have any other questions, just ask, there are many people here to help you. Unfortunately none of them will help you and you'll have to figure it out on your own. Good luck with that.

--Mike--

"I'll tell you what, yer dang lucky you didn't loose your mobil home because of them lightenings."