Computer Looks Like It Died

[slinga]

Hey guys,

I moved to DC for an internship, and it looks like my pc died. On saturday I went to a friend's house and spent the night. I came back, and my computer looked like it was frozen, the power was on, but there was nothing on the monitor. I rebooted and nothing happened. I did this like 10 times and eventually it booted up as normal. I used the computer for like 10-15 minutes, and went away for half an hour. When I came back, the comptuer was again frozen, with no display on the monitor. I turned it off and back on 100,000,000,000,000 times since, and it still doesn't work.

I did the following things:

- removed all PCI cards

- removed power to all IDE devices

- removed keyboard & mouse

- removed ram, and replaced one by one (I have three sticks)

All I get is a brief flash of light on the keyboard, and no display on the monitor. I really have no clue what the problem could be. I've never had trouble with this machine before. The only thing that I can think happened is that someone there was a power surge, and that fried my mobo. Since I'm not in my basement I don't have access to spare anythings. Any advice on what it could be? I'm stumped.

I going to spend today probably removing and reseating my mobo, but I have a feeling it's a bigger problem then that =(.

 

[schi0249]

Have you tried powering on with only power running to the system board? I usually start with that, then CPU, then memory 1 stick at a time. Course this requries going by beep codes. Not too bad.

 

[Alexvrb]

Beeps, or two-char displays, or even sometimes really crappy tinny voice. Anyway, do all your attached fans come on and do your drives power up? I don't care if they DO anything, but do they spin up?

 

[slinga]

All fans spin, all drives power up. I reseated the mobo last night, and when I did that it booted the bios twice. Then never again. I'm pretty sure it's either CPU is fried or power supply.

 

[Alexvrb]

Could be... but the PSU isn't completely shot if it powers everything up like that. Doesn't mean its working properly, of course.

 

[Quadriflax]

Sounds like maybe something's shorting on the motherboard? If you can, I would try replacing the power supply first. If that doesn't work it does sound like your board is toast. I had a board that one day didn't do anything. Everything powered on okay, but nothing on the screen. At least it gave me a reason to upgrade my hardware at the time

 

[SkankinMonkey]

Yea, it sounds like your Power Supply is fucked, hopefully it didn't fry your mobo in the process.

 

[slinga]

Quadriflax: yeah that's the path I chose too. It's a 4 year old machine, so I decided to buy a cheap P4 barebones and toss my hard drives in the new machine. How fully windows will work, but if not I got knoppix and suse live eval to fool around with.

 

[Alexvrb]

By "cheap P4 barebones" I hope you bought a seperate PSU. The crappy ones that come with most of those aren't worth the steel they're housed in. Oh well, it should work for a while as long as you're not putting a big load on it.

 

[slinga]

Doh, I didn't even think about that.

Anyway my new P4 barebones is finally in, and of course my old windows hard drive won't boot. I had a knoppix-std cd lying around, and works like a charm. Everything, including Divx works. Haven't checked sound, but that looks like it's working. I just view I had a whole lot more ram...