piemanji

Hello. This is my first post here. I hope you'll be able to help me! I've recently been trying to fix up my parents' old desktop (I'll call it PC #1) in the hope of slowly upgrading it as and when I can so that when my laptop dies (which is going to be fairly soon!) I'll have a decent replacement. It originally didn't give any output to the screen, though everything looked/sounded like it was starting up. I worked out (by using components of a friend's working desktop) that the problem was the motherboard. I managed to get hold of an old tower with motherboard, processor, RAM and PSU (PC #2). I removed the DVD drive and hard drive from #1 and put them in #2. Everything booted up and I got the Windows welcome screen - hooray! But it wouldn't work - it said I needed to activate it, and couldn't get it connected to the Internet in order to do this. So I got an Ubuntu disc out and tried to boot from that, but the BIOS hung on 'Boot from CD: '. I found a hint saying I should remove the BIOS battery and replace it a couple of minutes later, which I did, but then it wouldn't switch on at all. Nothing whatsoever from the PSU. So I removed it and replace it with the PSU from #1, which was certainly working a few days ago. Again, nothing at all. I tried plugging both straight into the wall without being attached to the motherboard. Nothing. So my question is/questions are - what is the problem here? Both PSUs seem to have died - but is this because of a faulty motherboard? And how might I have caused the problem? Should I just get a new PSU or is there a risk that might blow too, and should I get a new motherboard as well? Thanks in advance for your help.