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Steve Hamer
| | Posted on Wednesday, March 31, 2004 - 4:40 am: | |
Can somebody please help.
About 90% of the time I switch my computer on, the fans spin and all LEDs illuminate but thats as far as it goes. If I switch it on and off at the mains it will eventually (1 out of 5 tries)spring into life and start to boot but either of the following usually happens: it freezes during the boot; gets so far and resets itself to reboot or just dies to just fans spinning again. There are no beeps apart from when it springs into life where I get one beep as normal. A month before it started happening I installed a new DVD writer and a new graphics card but it worked fine. The computer is unable to get as far as starting windows at all now (apart from fifteen minutes yesterday) whereas when this problem happened before it sorted itself out the next morning.
The first time the problem developed it froze in the middle of surfing the net and wouldn't reboot. The computer was isolated from the mains for a couple of days while I upgraded the PSU to eliminate the problem of overloading with my new hardware and it worked fine afterwards for a few weeks.
The second time it happened, I left it overnight and switched it on and off a few times in the morning and it worked again for a while.
The next time was this weekend but after leaving it overnight it booted halfway and then died to just fans spinning again. I tried switching it off and on again at the mains but in between just fan activity it only half booted occasionally. I left it in my cold conservatory for an hour but still no joy. I noticed the heat sink compound had dried up on the CPU so I reapplied some more. Nothing. I am unable to get into the bios sometimes and when I do, it occasionally switches itself off while I'm looking through the options and reboots. I'm positive it's a hardrive problem but because the problem also happens in the BIOS setup, I don't think it's a HDD problem. I am pretty sure I could rule out a BIOS misconfiguration.
My computer is situated in a metre and a half by one metre room which used to be a walk-in cupboard and the setup is as follows.
AMD Athlon 800MHz
128MB RAM
20GB HDD
DVD Writer (No other CD/Floppy)
ATI Radeon 9200 Video (AGP)
TV Tuner Card (1 of 3 PCI)
Dial-up 56k Modem
Could somebody pleas suggest a remedy before I invest in new components to build a new machine on Saturday.
Thanks |
Moderator (Es)
Username: Es
Registered: 6-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, March 31, 2004 - 10:40 am: | |
Check your motherboard (especially around the CPU socket) for bulging or curved top capacitors. Generally power problems such as this points to some hardware failure on the motherboard.
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Steve Hamer
| | Posted on Friday, April 2, 2004 - 12:36 am: | |
Can't find a thing. After checking all connectors, I tried just leaving the CPU, RAM, Hard Drive and PSU connected, still nothing so I'm just giving up. Anyway I think I'm due for an upgrade! Thanks very much for your help. |
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