My Dell Studio XPS 8100 Stopped Working: Troubleshoot

Usually my computer will be ON 24×7(like most of your computers!). When I sleep, I let my computer download some stuffs for me. It may be some movies, music or any trial software or Windows 7 updates. Thanks to Karnataka(state) government for their frequent power outages, so that I shutdown my computer once in a while.

One day when I woke up, my computer was turned off, I thought there might have been a power failure at night. I tried to switch on my pride(Dell Studio XPS 8100), but to my surprise and shock, there was no response from my computer 🙁 It was all dead silent. I tried all the tricks I had learnt in my life, but no luck. I knew, if I call customer care and if they pick up my call after 5 – 8 tries and 30 – 45 minutes of wait, they will tell me to unplug all the wire and plug it in again and try to restart the computer. I did all these things, when nothing worked I tried my final option; that is to call customer care!

It wasn’t a complete surprise when no one picked my call until I tried 6 times with lot of persistency. Finally a girl received my call, talked so politely, heard all my problems, situation and calmly told that she will connect me to the technical team! Again, the wait began and finally I heard a guy answering my call: “Hey its Mark, how may I assist you”. Out of curiosity I asked him, where are you talking from? He said, Australia.

By this time, I had already gone into phonesia!

Phonesia: The affliction of dialing a phone number and forgetting whom you were calling, just as they answer!

I had no hopes of getting my PC fixed by the Dell support team via phone. I was worried about the data in my hard disk, I was worried about my business etc.

With all these, I continued talking to Mark. I explained him about the problem and as expected, he told me to pull all the wire behind CPU(Central Processing Unit). But he told me one extra weird thing to do.
He told me to switch off the power, remove the power plug/cable from the computer. And told me to press and hold the start button for 15 seconds.

Well this must be crazy thing to do. But I did it, as Mark told me to do. Because I had no other options left.

After 15 seconds I connected back all the cables and switched on the power and pressed the start button on my computer, and boom, to my surprise..my PC started working! it just gave me a warning message.

I asked Mark about what’s it in pressing and holding the start button for 15 seconds? He was generous to explain me that, there will be a battery(maybe a capacitor) which needs to be charged always. Once it looses its charge it stops responding to the press event of start button. To recharge it, we need to press and hold for 10 to 15 seconds and then it starts to respond like it did before!

Lesson learnt: Be open to learning. Be calm. Know that people who built the system aren’t stupid. Most importantly, Don´t judge too quickly!!

Above video is in no way directly related with this article, but shared it as it has some good message.

If you know any such troubleshoot tips and if you were in similar situation like me, then please share it with us in the comment section.