Hi everybody,

I received this P5-90 for free the other day, and was excited to try and get it up and running. For clarification, I'm a bit on the younger side and haven't really dealt with many PC's this old, so I apologize if some of my questions may seem simple.

The computer initially booted fine (seemingly) aside from warning me of a dead clock battery (it has one of those dallas ds12887 chip batteries), so I thought I'd order a coin cell replacement adapter and clean the computer in the meantime. However, following my cleaning of it (removing the dust primarily), I found the computer began to only intermittently display a video output. Sometimes I'd get picture and it would give me the battery warning, other times I'd get no video signal whatsoever. The PC always "turned on", with the HDD light flashing briefly (no HDD in it at the moment), and the power light would remain on, alongside the front intake fans blowing. However, when connected to a monitor, I'd occasionally get no video. I also noticed that sometimes the CD rom tray would not eject either, inspiring me to think that perhaps the power supply was the issue (the original owner that gave it to me had cut one of the floppy power cables off of the power supply for some reason...).

So, I ordered a replacement PSU (that being a used one off of ebay identical to the old one, an "Astec SA145-3435"). However, upon installing the replacement, I found that I no longer get any video out. CD ROM always ejects fine now, HDD light always briefly flashes, intake fans always spin up, but no picture. I checked both the memory (Two 32MB sticks) and video card (a PCI ATI Mach64 dated from 1994, not sure how many MB of video memory or other specs) in another computer I received from the same guy (which had a Gigabyte GA-586ATS board), and both the RAM and video card had no issues... I also tried reseating the CPU and removing any other cards in the system (there were 3 other cards, what seemed to be an ethernet card, a controller card for a tape deck that's also installed in the computer, and a modem card I believe) but didn't see any improvement

So, I guess I wanted to ask if anyone else has had similar issues with these mid-90's gateways, and what you all think the problem may be? Do you think I got another bad PSU? Is there some other problem perhaps I'm not thinking of? I don't think the bad Dallas battery chip would keep it from booting, but I guess this is hardware that's out of my current scope of knowledge. I'd really love to get this computer up and running, so any advice on what to try to do next to troubleshoot would be greatly appreciated. Thanks all,

- RubDub