Dell Inspiron desktop w/ Pentium 1, several years old.Turned on in morning, computer starts POST but fails to complete, screen turn black, power still on, I can hear the HDD tapping away. Unplugged, powered back on pressed F8, F11, F2, or F12 to boot in safe mode or to do anything else but those screens come up on the monitor but go black after maybe one half second. If I'm lucky I can maneuver the cursor to Safe Mode then Enter before the screen goes blank again. But as its loading the Windows files (usually pages) the screen goes black again without completing the task. All the other screens do the same thing. Also I've held in the power button until it turned itself off and repowered again and the the screen showed the Launch Recovery option as expected but the screen goes black even if i'm fast enough to select it.I had a System Recovery CD that I had made a long while back that I assumed was functional but the computer wouldn't boot up with it in the dvd drive. All I got was cursor on a black screen OR nothing at all.Finally I was able to get into Safe Mode, not by doing anything different but just by repetively trying to reboot, finally it said Launch Recovery which worked. I did a ESET NOD 32 virus scan that showed a couple of threats that were deleted. I made a System repair disk, I went back to a previous restore point a couple weeks back when everything worked well. The computer seemed to work normally so I did a normal shut down and went to bed. Today the same problem happened. I'm confused as to what is happening. It won't complete a POST, the screen just blacks out as before. Today I removed the 3 sticks of RAM and put the individually into slot 1 (and other variations) but there was no change when booting. I attached the HDD to another computer as an external HDD and ran a complete Virus scan but nothing showed up. The HDD seems to work ok hwen attached as an external HDD. Is this a motherboard failure? Any suggestions would be appreciated. BTW, all peripherals have been disconnected during testing. Thanks.
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