guzzidom Posted November 21, 2005 Posted November 21, 2005 My secretary at work has been having PC probs and got some local repair guy out who put a disc in the DVD drive, read some text and pronounced the machine dead (rather unhelpfully I thought). As she can't stretch to a new rig I offered to help out, the problem is that the machine fails to put anything on the screen at all, there are no post bleeps about half the time and when you do get it to post it locks randomly even before it gets to the "detect IDE drives" though by then it has normally run through the memory and cpu test and pronounces them correctly. It always locks up before you can press "DEL" to access BIOS. What I've done thus far 1, took out mobo battery and after 30 secs replaced it with a new one 2, fitted my spare power supply (400w) 3, swapped the old mx440 GPU with my spare 9600xt 4, put the hard drive in my rig as slave and rescued all her files (drive seems fine) 5, Won the exact same mobo on Ebay for $20 (brand new) I went for the mobo because it only had 6 minutes left to run on Ebay and I hadn't had the time to swap the 1700xp out for an old 900 Duron I've got knocking about and I figured that on the rare occasion I can get this thing to the first posting page it seems to recognise the CPU correctly and amount of Ram and therefore is probably OK. It's a Jetway V266b board with 256mb of pc2100 a 40gb Seagate and a generic 250w psu. Have I missed anything?, the machine is very much unmolested and made by Campus Computers (who I must say have really put some decent effort in with regards to cable management) and I recall she bought it 3 years ago when it won the "best Superbudget group test" in one of the magazines. Do you reckon my "dead mobo" call is correct. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
oblivescence Posted November 21, 2005 Posted November 21, 2005 could be bad ram, try taking out the ram and putting in known good ram into one of the slots, try different slots as i have seen before one dimm accept ram with no problem and another not accept it at all. thats all i know. good luck Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kamikaze_Badger Posted November 21, 2005 Posted November 21, 2005 (edited) Sounds like a RAM or CPU issue to me. Do you have any diagnostic cards or software? Edited November 21, 2005 by Kamikaze_Badger Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
hardnrg Posted November 21, 2005 Posted November 21, 2005 yeah, i'd try a stick of known good ram, and check the heatsink... try to find the safe-mode startup for the mobo if there is one... try the duron... Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
guzzidom Posted November 21, 2005 Posted November 21, 2005 I kind of discounted the ram as a possible fault simply because it has been running fine for the last 3 yrs and I've never personally had any deteriorate on me on a stock machine and ditto the cpu, 3 yrs running fine at stock speed, though I suppose everything fails eventually, and she has kept it in the conservatory for the last 6 months where it is probably getting extremes of temperature now. The mobo's on it's way now so there's no getting out of that. If the problem persists I'll fit my Duron and a freind of mine has a stick of DDR going spare I could use. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ste Posted November 21, 2005 Posted November 21, 2005 (edited) Edit: if it sometimes gets to the IDE channels, then it could be a faultly motherboard also, we will know for sure when you shove in new motherboard. Bad power supplies can also cause failure to post with varying degrees of success but u said you swaped it out with a differen't PSU. So not that. Edited November 21, 2005 by Ste Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nerm Posted November 21, 2005 Posted November 21, 2005 It could be a bad mobo, but with the symptoms you described it really sounds more like ram or cpu to me. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
guzzidom Posted November 21, 2005 Posted November 21, 2005 It sometimes gets to "searching for IDE drives", but thats the furthest I've ever got it before it stops, In fact even with the new PSU and GPU it's now reverted to not even posting a bleep again. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ste Posted November 21, 2005 Posted November 21, 2005 Its gotta be either motherboard, CPU, or RAM. My vote is in for bad motherboard. Second RAM, Third CPU. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
guzzidom Posted November 21, 2005 Posted November 21, 2005 Yeah, I swapped out the Athlon and the poor old Duron wouldn't even boot to any screens (and I know it's ok), I removed the Ram and reseated it in the next slot (worth a go), I'm really feeling motherboard right now but I'm getting some more ram tomorrow off a buddy and that will be the final component swapped over, this Ebay board had better work! Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vasto Posted November 23, 2005 Posted November 23, 2005 For all the trouble your going through, she better be good looking... Could it be a corrupt bios? Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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