I have a 1990s era Dell Precision 420 Workstation running windows NT. Has been running fine since 1998. Now it shuts down very repeatably.
After lengthy troubleshooting, I have narrowed the problem down to the system shuts off almost immediately when any image is displayed on the monitor. The system will stay on indefinitely without a graphics card installed.
I have tried 2 different graphics cards, 3 different power supplies, 2 different hard drives with NT installed on each, different memory, applied new thermal grease to both processors and the only way to keep it from crashing is to remove the graphics card. There is not much heat monitoring, but everything feels cool and the thing will crash from a cold start in a minute or 2 or as long as it takes to boot. I left system running all night displaying only Bios and it didn't shut down, but as soon as anything else is displayed after boot, system will completely shut down as if the plug was yanked out of the wall.
I don't know much, but have exhausted all ideas. Only thing I haven't done is replace the motherboard, if one even exists. I would appreciate any ideas you may have. Thanks.
After lengthy troubleshooting, I have narrowed the problem down to the system shuts off almost immediately when any image is displayed on the monitor. The system will stay on indefinitely without a graphics card installed.
I have tried 2 different graphics cards, 3 different power supplies, 2 different hard drives with NT installed on each, different memory, applied new thermal grease to both processors and the only way to keep it from crashing is to remove the graphics card. There is not much heat monitoring, but everything feels cool and the thing will crash from a cold start in a minute or 2 or as long as it takes to boot. I left system running all night displaying only Bios and it didn't shut down, but as soon as anything else is displayed after boot, system will completely shut down as if the plug was yanked out of the wall.
I don't know much, but have exhausted all ideas. Only thing I haven't done is replace the motherboard, if one even exists. I would appreciate any ideas you may have. Thanks.