*OT* Sorry for the delay, wild morning with these swings.
Does the computer beep at you when you turn it on at all? If it is a motherboard and it is at least getting power, it should beep some error codes when you first turn it on. If you get any kind of display at all, bad boards will usually give you a message something like "Parity Bit check error" , "Check sum error" etc. These can be bad boards, processors or memory but unfortunately, they are usually boards.
You might also try booting up on a Win 98 boot disk even if you are running a different operating system. Boot disks will load basic DOS for you so you can at least see you directories if it is just an operating system problem, corrupt hard drive etc. and will automatically fix some common problems.
Last, you can try to get to your BIOS but you kind of have to know what you are looking for and have to be careful you don't mess anything up in there. Getting to BIOS on initial boot is usually done by hitting the Delete key as the computer is starting. Something may have glitched and your BIOS could be set for the wrong kind of video display ( VGA vs PCI etc) hopefully you know what kind of card you are running ( Most newer machines are VGA)
These all assume you don't have a totally fried board, power supply, Processor or memory. Let me know if it beeps, if you can hear any of the fans running, if you get any kind of blinking cursors, messages etc at all. Also if you know if you have EDO RAM or SDRAM, DDR RAM etc. One bad EDO RAM chip can bring down the whole system and they work in pairs. This is old fashioned RAM so if your machine is newer than 99 or so, you probably have SDRAM. If the computer beeps at you when it tries to boot up, see if you can tell what kind of board is in it and write down how many times it beeps. We can go on line and get the code meanings that way. If you built it yourself, it is probably an ABIT, ASUS or FIC if a shop did it, it is probably FIC or one of the cheaper boards.
You can either PM me, e-mail me at lee.lichterman@marketswing.com or post on the boards over on our site somewhere and I will just erase them once we are done.
If you go inside the case, make sure you ground yourself to the case before touching anything else or the static electricity can fry your components, especially RAM as you remove things.
Good Luck,
Lee |
