Touchsmart only boots occasionally [ Edited ]

[Stoker]

I have a Touchsmart 300-1120, Win7 Home Premium 64bit..

The machine takes sometimes as many as ten power cycles to boot from a powered down state. It will power on (fans come up, power light, lights up) but the screen doesn't light up, no bios screen, no activity on the HDD/DVD or USB. I have boot order set to boot DVD drive first so I put in a bootable DVD to see if the HDD might be choking but it doesn't matter if I am booting from the DVD Drive, a bootable USB device, or HDD, if it comes up in the fail state it behaves as described. When it does come up the drive seems fine and all the data is there. So, I don't think it is suffering from the bad HDD issue some people have seen. The machine will often stay up for many hours at a time if it is being used. If it sleeps, sometimes it will come out of sleep but others it fails in the same way the cold power up fails: power light changes color, can hear things running, but no HDD/DVD activity, no screen, completely frozen.

During normal work it will sometimes simply freeze (monitor stays on screen freezes, no other activity on the disks, power cycle required) and it also blue screens sometimes.

I've been searching and have seen all kinds of things blamed for this kind of behavior, most commonly bad hdd but it "feels" more like a power supply or mobo type issue. What do you guys think?

BTW, I've also tried a system restire from the restore partition.

[Jonathan_N]

Click Here to learn how to perform a hard reset.  This resolves some intermittent hardware and software issues.

Click Here to learn about the diagnostics in your touchsmart.  I would test the video/graphics card first.  That's what the symptoms sound like to me.  When you get the chance reply with your product number and i may be able to supply more solid advice.

[Stoker]

The hard reset instructions you linked to are not even for a touchsmart all in one which is what my box is... they are for a laptop.

[Jonathan_N]

I know it is.  It's the same scenario except there is, of course, not battery to remove.  Just remove all power and peripherals and hold the power button down for a few seconds.  Let me know how it goes.  Did you try the diagnostics?