Need opinions

Hey guys,
I'm no pro at IT by any means but I do have a decent amount of knowledge, so feel free to get technical here. But my situation is this:

My main computer, (by no means a high speed gaming rig or media center in the slightest), finally gave up the ghost saturday night. I've been leaving it on for days at a time since it's getting closer to being 4 years old and I don't want the PS going bad from constant, daily on/off switching. Saturday night, it froze while playing a rather graphics intensive game. It started up again after that and when I tried to reload the game (stupid mistake, I know),the machine shut down altogether. Tried restarting again and thought I was hearing the dreaded thump of death from the HD but when I opened the case, it was the fan stalling and refusing to spin. Heat sink was blazing hot to the touch, fan broke a blade and doesn't really run right at all now. But I did get it to at least run ...

Which brings me to the crux of all this mess. Now, when you start the computer up, the fan at least runs but there is no POST. Not even a POST failure beep code. The power light on the front of the case stays solid red and the fan just runs, nothing starts. I've never seen this but I'm guessing at this point I've either fried the cpu or the MoBo or both.

I'm going to test the HD here at work on another computer to see if it is at least still accessible. Meantime, I took off the heat sink and fan and noticed dust throughout and dust underneath, around the edges of where the thermal compound was between the sink and the cpu. I'm thinking dust may have gotten past all that, crowded up the chip and fried it from too much heat.

I know I wrote a lot. Wanted to be thorough and get some more educated and experienced opinions on this. Thanks for any help.

J. C. P.

 

I would first check the power supply; you can get a cheap one and test it out. The motherboard does have a fail-safe tool that shuts off the PC if it is overheating: hint...(Bad Fan) before it burns-up the CPU or the motherboard altogether.

 

I had a similisr problem with a work computer, after fan was replaced comp wouldn't do anything, we ended up replacing it, our it guy said it was dead for good.

 

Yeah, I checked the power supply and the fans were running. At this point I'm fearing the MoBo and cpu may be gonners. Haven't had time to test out my HD yet but that is my main concern. My big external I used for backups died a long time ago and my smaller, 40G external won't hold a full back up from my main. The partial back ups that are on there are at least a few months old too. First lesson of IT and I completely ignored it ...well actually I just didn't have the money to replace my externals. Now I may be dishing out to get a new mobo. Dammit.