On 20 May 2005 16:17:50 -0700,
(E-Mail Removed) wrote:
>I have a home-built computer that I put together a couple years ago
>which has suddenly pooped itself. On start-up, the system only gives a
>long beep followed by a pause and then the long beep and so on. It does
>not load Windows. My system specs are:
>
>Windows XP Pro w/ SR1
>1.4 GHZ AMD Thunderbird CPU
>ABIT AT7-MAX2 motherboard
>768 MB CRUCIAL DDR PC2100 RAM
>ATI RADEON 9600 XT AGP 8x/4x Graphics card
>WESTERN DIGITAL 120GB ATA 100 7200 rpm hard drive
>WESTERN DIGITAL 60GB ATA 100 7200 rpm hard drive
>PLEXTOR PlexWriter 24x10x40 E-IDE (ATAPI) CD-RW drive
>CENDYNE DVD ROM drive
>1.44MB SONY floppy drive
>CREATIVE audio PCI sound card
>
>Any thoughts on the most likely cause of the problem? Any asistance is
>much appreciated!
Not knowing the beep codes of that board, I couldn't say for sure, but
what I would suggest is to start by stripping the system down. Try
booting with ONLY the processor, motherboard and power supply. At the
very least that might give you a different error code saying "there's
no memory installed". Then try it with a single stick of memory
(actually try each of the sticks separately). If the system were
working normally than this should POST, though you won't see much
without a video card in the system. Then slowly build up from there,
one component at a time until it fails.
Of course, my personally guess is that it'll be a bad motherboard.
That board came out in the era of bad capacitors, see
http://www.badcaps.com/ for a bit more info on this problem. LOTS of
motherboards failed due to this problem, most with the sort of
symptoms you're describing. Check the capacitors for signs of damage.
-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca
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