wife's pc died.....not good....

IDLE

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Joined
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well i need to keep the wife happy and im having a hrd time figuring out what went bad.

here is the story. had a thunderstorm a few hours ago and the pcs turned off(including mine) both of them fired up fine like normal. no errors..nothing. my wifes pc went into her screen saver and then the screen went black..normal...monitor turns off. she trie to get on it and all that comes up is the screen saver for the monitor...basically a self test mode.

ive pulled out all hardware in the pc except the CPU and the thing wont post. i here no beeping. im using RAMBUS ram...meaning that if the ram is not in the PC while booting it beeps like crazy.

conclusion, would you say the Mother board it toast or the CPU

running a P4.17ghz socket 478 with 384mb of rambus ram nvidia 5600 256mb card.


any ideas?
 
try taking the CMOS battery out for 5-10 mins then putting it back in
 
still no go. does the same thing after keeping the chip out for a bit and reseeding it. the cpu fan starts up but thats it
 
everything appears to power up fine. althouhg i know they can be weird but i dont have a spare one for the time being
 
"all that comes up is the screen saver for the monitor...basically a self test mode."

The monitor is not seeing the PC. It could be the power supply or the video card.
If it were the MB or CPU I would still expect the monitor to act like it was connected to a PC.

Disconnect the power supply from everything. Stick a peice of wire (metal paperclips work) between the Green wire and an adjacent black wire ont he MB connector. The PS fan should spin up. If not PSU is probably dead.

If the PSU fan spins up, turn it off wait 30 seconds and plug it back into the MB w/CPU installed with nothing else installed. Hit the power switch and see if the PSU Fan and CPU fan spin up. If they do PSU is probaby all right. If you get any post beeps MB and CPU are ok.

If you made it this far it is probably the video card.

Be careful swapping in good parts to check things. A blown MB or PSU can fry anything in the system RAM, CPU, Video, etc.
 
take out the video card and see if you get the one beep. if that doesnt happen then my money on a psu that problay took a motherboard with it.
 
Pull the PSU out of your PC and install in her's. Then boot and see if it works. Also do same with video card, try video card first and if that doesn't do it then the PSU. It sounds like the thunder storm fried something. Was it connected to a surge supressor?


All this if the PSU and/or video card are compatable one with the other.
 
well i swapped PSU and video cards into her pc and still nothing. looks like the mobo is dead.

right now its an Intel 850gb p4 1.7ghz board. what can i find thats equivelant to that. it is using Rambus pc800 but i am WANTING to get rid of that crap. what are some boards that will work for this junk? im willing to get all new memory so that not a problem.
 
That will work for an 800 mhz Prescott P4 or celeron, it doesn't say it works for 533 mhz P4 cores. You need to know if the CPU is 533mhz or 800 mhz FSB.

Speaking of the CPU how do you know the CPU is still good? Either a bad MB or a bad CPU can keep the system from doing a POST.

Memory is easy. Go to newegg and you can get:
512mb ddr pc3200 (400mhz) for $40
or 256 mb ddr pc3200 (400mhz) for $22

and while you're there order a couple of good surge supressors. I didn't beleive in using them until a storm fried my good casette deck. Now every peice of electronics in my house is on them, including the $20 portable phones.
 
Last edited:
will do. i found a different mobo that supports the 400mhz cpu that im using thats $40 dollars. cheaper than a CPU right now. if it is the cpu then ill work fomr there. i will also look int a surge protector
 

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