Talk about a bad hair day. PC crapped out

Sage

Well this week has been blast. I decided to help my girlfriend with her PC problems and decided to bring mine over to see if I could bring hers to life again. I got to her place and when I go to turn on my PC the thing won't turn on. Great...

The only thing I was getting from time to time were blue screens of death but when I would unplug my wacom, scanner, and network cable it would boot up again.

Things I have tried on mine...

I got a new power supply to see if that was the problem and the PC starts but I get nothing but a black screen. The PC is pretty old I got it in 1999.

I went to Staples to see if they had anything I might want since I returned the power supply to Comp USA acroos the street. One of the sales rep told me that he had a similar case, but it was his RAM that causeed his computer not to start.. I'll be trying that to see what happens.

My PC are specs

Gateway

Dual Pentium 3 processor
Geforce 4 TI 4400 128
512 megts of ram
80 gig hardrive
zip drive
floppy
200 watt power supply

Running Windows 2000 latest service pack.

Any advise on how to solve this besides buying a new pc would be great. Thanks.

Alex

sonic

Do you get any POST beeps? If nothing happens at all, it could definitely be due to RAM problems. Try borrowing a stick of SD-RAM from a friend, pop it in your comp and see if it boots. If that's not the problem, it's most likely one of your processors or the motherboard. If it's the motherboard, I'd recommend buying a new comp, because even the P3 dual motherboards are fairly expensive.

Psyk0

My cousin's old P2 started rebooting and beeping at POST caused by faulty RAM. Do you have 1 stick of RAM or 2x256? Try taking 1 out (switch until you find the "good one"). see if comp behaves normally.

Another case of bad RAM happened on a friend's computer, XP install would fail when copying random files and resulted in a blue screen on each try...no beeps this time.

ElysiumGX

definately reinsert the RAM. things get knocked around when moving. I had a wonderful evening once trying to fix a friend's PC before realizing this was the only problem.

Ramucho

got somethiing like this last year had to change the mobo tho..

greenj2

I had my pc die on me a few months ago. I guessed it was the mobo but it took a lot of messing around to make sure as I didn't have many spare parts to swap in. My best advice would be to start simple and gradually rebuild the system, attaching and testing the parts as you go. Like just the psu and mobo first, then add ram ( I think some mobos won't start up without any), then your system drive, ect. Obviously the more spare parts you have to swap in and test the better for you.

Make sure your mobo is responding to power, cpu/chipset fans spinning, leds lighting up. If you're not even getting to post that seems like bad news. Like Sonic said, if it's not the ram I'd say it's a mobo or cpu problem. Which would probibly have you looking at a new system.

That's about all I can think of that might help, good luck.

Sage

Thanks for the quick replies! The lights did go on when I had the new power supply in, but the PC wouldn't turn off except when I would shut of the power supply. I tried it twice before giving up on that. I had two hardrives in there, they seem to have gotten damaged because of that since my girlfriend's computer won't see them anymore. Well if that's the case I am pretty screwed since it would mean I lost the newest work in my reel. I'll post my progress. Thanks.

Alex

hawken

did you try the ram thing first? I can join the bunch of ram replies here and say I had similar problems once, it was the ram.

Sage

I tried the ram with the old power supply and still nothing. I have two 256 EEC sticks of ram made by Crucial. I'll try again with other ram.

Alex

sonic

i'm assuming that crucial ECC ram you put in in the test replacement? if it's ECC ram, make sure you have an ECC motherboard. if it's a dual proc motherboard it very well could be ECC, but double check.

sledgy

What do the blue screens say?