I am terrible at troubleshooting. Usually its easier for me to start from scratch, so I am looking for some guidance. I've been building my own machines for awhile now so am fairly familiar with the hardware. This current one has an ecs elitegroup motherboard with an intel processor. Its been running fine til yesterday. I don't very often turn it off but when I sat down at the computer yesterday I got nothing. The power light was on on the case but nothing else was working. I shut it down and opened the case. The insides were a mess. I hadn't cleaned it in quite some time. I cleaned it out good and tryed restarting it. Again nothing. When I first press the power button the fan trys to turn than stops. The little lite on the motherboard is on but nothing else is working. Is there anything I can do to revive it???????

When you cleaned it out did you clean the PCU heat sink and fan, if there is a buildup of dust there it will overheat and shut down, another thing to check is to see if the location of you air intake is impeded by dust or pet fur.

One other thing to try would be to open the case and and see if it will start with it open, if it does that will indicate that you have an air flow problem.

I did try it with the case open and the same thing happened. I'm afraid the insides were covered with dust. Since we live in the desert dust is a big problem and I haven't been as good at keeping up with it as I should be. The fan and heatsink on the processor was caked with dust. Still get the same results after thorough cleaning. When I turn the power on the fan jumps then goes dead

Try running the computer with bare minimals (ie, take out the CD drive, only use 1 stick of RAM use onboard video, if there is, even take out the harddrive). Being you said you built it, I'm sure your familiar with grounding yourself first before doing any of this or doing it on a hardtop counter or something that wont have static electricity and don't do it on a rug or stand on one either.

Regards,
TheYoda

I have tryed it that way. So does this mean the power supply is bad, the motherboard is fbad or could I have fryed the processor?

Well you have the parts listed in reverse order of most likley culprit. I would try to see if you have another PSU lying around or borrow someone else's and test it. Than work your way to a solution from there.

Regards,
TheYoda

Yea, you probably either got a fatal short with the dust or maybe your PSU is still clogged with dust and is thusly not starting up due to its lack of cooling. It may also be something is not plugged in like the mobo or CPU fan or HDD or something. In short: blast your PSU with a can of air, make sure all the connections you need from the PSU are in, and last ditch effort switch out the PSU.

Ok lots more info. Power supply works on another system but not on this one. I got the fan for the processor with no improvement. I figure at this point it is either the boeard or the processor. Is there any way of telling which or both?

If you know someone who has another board with the same socket, take out teh CPU and test it in that socket. If it works, than it's your board, if it doesn't, than its your CPU.

Regards,
TheYoda