First thoughts...

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Prizef1ghter

Weaksauce
Joined
Jun 10, 2004
Messages
105
What if this happened to you.

Everything is running good with your PC. One time, you power it on and boot up winxp, go to work on it, and all of a sudden your PC freezes. Not being able to enter any keyboard commands or anything, you power it off and back on.

Now, you are getting no video. Monitor does not receive signal one and immediately goes into shutdown/powersave mode. Your fans are whirring like normal but that's it. You get the normal power green light in the front and the hard drive amber light stays on constantly. You're pretty sure that you are not booting into windows because you don't get your welcome sound after putting in your password (things you can do with no monitor).

You try another monitor and that gets no signal either.

You are an experienced hardware PC guy, you obviously know that you're gonna have to do some troubleshooting and swapping of known good components, but what does your gut tell you right away? Motherboard dead? or video card dead? Or power supply dead?
 
i guess my reaction would depend on knowing some facts. Age of the components, what type and brand they are, etc.

for a relatively new build with name brand components, i would say vid card, since thats the likeliest in my experience. or, if its a high end with its own power connection, then PSU possibly. depends on brands again.

for older computer, probably mobo. my experience with vid cards has been either they go bad quickly or not at all. Of course, i've dealt with mostly desktop machines and not gaming, no o/cing anywhere, so that could be different in your case.

for some reason, the PSU strikes me as the least likely possibility. i guess just because usually they go bad entirely, not in pieces. but who knows?

good luck, i just experienced the agony of my computer dying :( didn't notice that the processor fan wasn;t spinning and smelled that lovely burning odor. oh the humanity
 
Okay, its a fairly recent PC, almost a year old.

It has a Gigabyte motherboard, an Antec 350 watt PS, P4 300 I think, ATI Radeon (i forget which exactly, the good one before the next generation came out 5 or 6 months ago right before SLI became all the rage) i wanna say 9600???or 9800??. Like I said, all the fans are working, even on the video card. One of the main problems is, I don't have a video card to swap into it. It has that 'deluxe' AGP slot and my other AGP card won't fit into it. I tried an old PCI video card that I know works and that displays absolutely no video either which further leads me down the path of motherboard.
 
have you tried swapping RAM? I think that would present with different symptoms, but you never know.

and yea, thats sounding a lot like a video card problem. Maybe you can test your card in another system?
 
Dagatech said:
have you tried swapping RAM? I think that would present with different symptoms, but you never know.

and yea, thats sounding a lot like a video card problem. Maybe you can test your card in another system?
Click to expand...


I can dig what you're sayin, but like I said, I can't put the ATI card in any system I have access to and I don't have any way to get to another late model motherboard. It sucks to not be able to troubleshoot that properly, but, IF the video card was bad, wouldnt I still be able to log into windows and have my opening sound play to confirm that I indeed went into Windows even with no video?
 
most motherboards require some type of video to get anywhere. i think theres some type of jumper trick you can use to fake it into working, but i have no idea how to do that. basically, i think you're screwed without other stuff to test with. Maybe you have a computer store nearby that has spare parts for testing with? costs a few bucks, but a lot cheaper than buying new parts usually. good luck...
 
test in this order..

psu
video card
ram
processor
mother board.

i start with the psu because it's the easiest to test. I have one of those little devices that just pluf into the psu and tells you weather it's bad or not..

next is the video cause it's the next likly problem but without the beeps i doubt it. beeps go like this.

long, short, short, "short delay", short

without that beep code i don't think it's the video but check anywayz.

next is the ram cause the mobo will turn on with no beep codes if the mem is bad.

next check the cpu same symptoms as the mem...

next replace the mobo...it's dead...

and that's how I diagnose it..
 
Unless your running XP pro or Server 2xxx, your vid card has to give signal for Windows to actually boot up...and that's only if it's confiqured that way...(for those of you running Linux...hah ah good luck, cause every distro has differant log ins and such = mine has a GUI point and click name, then enter password....can't point at what ya can't see)
 
I agree with Erland, good procedure is to try and get the mobo to post with as few components as possible, then slowly add them back one at a time. (I once had a mobo where everytime I changed ANYTHING in the hardware I had to do this). I've seen a few comps do pretty much exactly what you are describing and in each case it was a dead mobo. Best of luck!
 
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