chris wrote:

Hi,
my wife recently aquired an oldish ex work PC which I would like to reuse
for our kids as the spec is still resonable and it has a fiar amount of
memory /disk - however the problem is the power on and reset switches on the
main case. They only work perhaps once in 50 or so times

What are the symptoms, other than it not powering on. I mean, do the
switches 'stick' in one position or the other, or not move at all, or move
but no 'click', or what?

Look inside the case and see how they're mounted. Are they simply loose? Is
the mounting bracket broken off the front bezel support?

What I mean is, it may be possible to simply fix the ones that are there.

so I wondered if
there was a way of replacing these

Yes, they can be replaced but it's not easy to describe in text because
you're unlikely to find some place that sells a 'direct replacement' so
it's a matter of looking at them and finding something close enough to fit,
and that depends on being passingly familiar with typical switches and
perhaps some ingenuity in mating them to the existing brackets inside. If
it's a *simple* one it might simply be a round shaft, momentary, switch
screwed into a flat bracket behind the plastic pushbutton and another
'standard' round shaft, momentary, switch could be put in the same hole,
perhaps using the back nut to adjust how far/close to the plastic plunger
it is so it depresses and releases properly.

The generic solution is to buy a 'normal' pushbutton switch from some
generic supplier, Like radio Shack, and simply drill a couple of new,
correct size, holes in the front bezel, mount the new 'standard' switches
and move the power and reset wires to them. That means snipping the wires
off the old switches and soldering them to the new ones.

or just bypassing the switches and
hardwiring and using the main PSU on/off switch to power the PC?

Well, there's not really anything to 'bypass'. Wiring the power switch
permanently 'on' would cause the computer to turn itself right back off
after the 6 seconds, or so, "hold me down to power off' timeout and
'bypassing' the reset switch is "disconnect it," but since it don't work
anyway it's already 'disconnected'.

If the BIOS power settings can be set to always power on after a power
failure then you might be able to cycle the rear switch to turn it on but
that's really a kludge.


I'm not sure what effect taking out these switches would have.

Any ideas appreciated -

TIA
Chris