I connected a printer while the PC was on,and now the computer won't even boot up! E/T was fine until I connected the printer. Did I do major damage or can it be fixed? It won't boot up from the Dell repair CD, it just whirs and nothing on the monitor. Won't go into safe mode even (running Win XP). Thank you.

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Connecting a printer shouldnt have affected anything to the degree that you describe.Is the printer parallel or USB.
Did connecting cause an imeddiate failure or did it fail only after rebooting.
How old is the system.
What are the machines hardware specs.
Has anything else in the machines setup been changed recently either hardware or software.?
Have you tried removing the printer to make sure that it isnt the cause of the problem.
Can you see the initial POST screen or does the lack of video only occur when windows starts to boot?

Are you able to enter BIOS to ensure that nothing has somehow been altered?
Have you tried booting up with a windows 98 floppy to see if perhaps the hard drive is causing problems.

Parallel printer.
Worked great until I connected the printer that had always been connected to it, and it worked fine before. Dell is about 1 year old, I'm not sure of exact specs but it was top-of-the line last year; connecting caused it to immediately lock up. Then when I rebooted, it hung, When I rebooted again it had a long DOS-type error message. Instead of writing it down i just turned everything off. Then it never started back up again. Nothing else was done. tried disconnecting the printer, still wouldn't boot. Tried safe mode, wouldn't go, can't enter BIOS. YOu can hear the computer fan, but lights go dim, and nothing shows on the screen. Haven't tried booting with a floppy yet.

Do you know what model it is. You may be able to go to the Dell site and find out what hardware is in it from there.
Is it still under warranty? If it turns out to be a hardware failure that may be your best option if it is still under warranty.

If you cant see anything on the screen and cant get into BIOS it would be unlikely that you would be able to boot from a floppy disk.

Thanks for your help.

I'll have to get the serial number and check Dell's website. Warranty expired 2 months ago. Will try a floppy first and see what happens.

About the only thing that would have killed it is if you hit it with a big electrostatic charge when you connected the printer....

Since your warranty is expired, the next thing I would do is a barebones boot. In this you disconnect all drives, remove all but one stick of RAM and try to boot with just motherboard, CPU, power, power switch, case speaker, video, keyboard and the one stick of RAM. You boot and see if you get a beep... A single beep is a successful POST (Power On Self Test) and you are lucky. Other types of beeps mean different things that we can help you figure out with more info about the model you have. No beep means that you may be out of luck. If that is the case, post back here with as much detail as possible and we can give you ideas for the next step...