Original Post
Last night I went to switch off my desk lamp and heard a rather loud pop which sounded rather electrical, I tried switching my computer on (it was off at the time) and found it didn't boot, in the serial port I had a plug with a few wires soldered to it plugged which I had carlessly left just lying all over the place and one of them had an exposed end in contact with the case (or at least very close) so as far as I can tell I shorted one of the pins of the serial port to the earthed case, though I wouldn't have thought that that would destroy the entire motherboard especially when the computer is off. Now when I attempt to switch it on all the fans start whirring (that's the PSU one, the main case fan, the GFX card one and a small one on the motherboard), the HD activity light briefly flickers, and the DVD drive appears to be doing something (at least I can hear it whiring and the activity light is on for a period of time), there's also a green light lit up on the motherboard but nothing actually happens (i.e. no screen activity and no beeps to indicate sucess/failure of POST). So it very much looks like the motherboard has gone. I tried testing the voltage levels of the PSU just in case it was just something dodgy there and the 3.3v levels seemed to be fine, I noticed the 5v pins were actually more like 5.6v, and the 12v and -12v pins were more like 11.2v and -11.8v respectively. However this was under no load whatsoever and they're not huge differences so it looks like the PSU is perfectly fine. Does anyone have any other ideas as to why the computer would fail to boot? It's a shuttle xpc system and I can live without it but if I can fix it reasonably cheaply I would like to do so.