About a month ago my Dell started acting up after it was shut off, when you tried to power it back up the power led would flash orange and the computer wouldnt start. After like 10-15 tries it would finally start if you said a magic word and did the rain dance. Now its completly dead, wont power up for anything.

I've tried dells troubleshooting walkthrough and unplugged everything systematically and tried starting the beast up with no luck so far, I cant talk to their tech support people since my warranty expired about 2 years ago, and I'm not about to pay for them to tell me I need to buy a whole new system.

Hoping someone has some helpful info or something, also crossing my fingers its not my HDD failing because I'll be a sad panda.

Have a Dell Dimension E521 4gb ram, and 512 video card slapped in

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If you can't even get it to post, probably the power supply. Unless your case is some weird freak of nature, you should just be able to go pick one up from best buy or Frys to swap and test.

I'd say go with a 450 to 500w power supply. Wattage isn't really the biggest thing. You want to look how many amps are pulled across the 12 volt rails. Look at the power supply specs and look for like the +12v1, +12v2 and so on. Add up all those numbers and select one that comes to 30 or more.

I always go with Antec brand, some people like Corsair or whatever.

Thanks Givin. I'll have to wait until payday to get a new one but at least I know its not my HDD at this point, losing all of our pictures and movies would suck, picking up an external HDD for backup too just in case.

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