Computer beeps once about every 5 min

[Joe T.]

I was down at my sisters yesterday for dinner and she has a computer I built
for her about 4 or 5 yrs ago. XP Home edition, Retail-NOT OEM, 100g HD, 25g
free space. She said for about the last year or so, it has been been
occaasionally beeping one beep about every 5 min while it's running.
Computer boots and and runs fine although junked up with what I consider
totally useless "womans" stuff slowing it down. I freed up 15gig during my
checking.
I suspect possible ram because she said she may have, but can't remember, if
she put in more ram years ago and I can't remember either if I put in 1 or 2
sticks of 512 either when I built it.
While I was there I forgot to note the mother board manufacturer to check
their site for code beeps. Does that matter? One google site says 1 beep
equals Ram check.
Thanks

 

[Paul]

I was down at my sisters yesterday for dinner and she has a computer I built
for her about 4 or 5 yrs ago. XP Home edition, Retail-NOT OEM, 100g HD, 25g
free space. She said for about the last year or so, it has been been
occaasionally beeping one beep about every 5 min while it's running.
Computer boots and and runs fine although junked up with what I consider
totally useless "womans" stuff slowing it down. I freed up 15gig during my
checking.
I suspect possible ram because she said she may have, but can't remember, if
she put in more ram years ago and I can't remember either if I put in 1 or 2
sticks of 512 either when I built it.
While I was there I forgot to note the mother board manufacturer to check
their site for code beeps. Does that matter? One google site says 1 beep
equals Ram check.
Thanks

I've heard of that happening before. But when you get a beep while the OS is
running, you would not interpret the beep code as a normal BIOS failure code.
So one beep doesn't mean bad RAM. It could be a temperature warning, a fan
fail warning, a Vcore out-of-spec warning, or something obscure like that.
The BIOS is not in a position to be testing RAM, once the OS is running.
The BIOS could be accessing the hardware monitor. Or even some other
code running in the machine could be doing that (like cruft loaded
on the hard drive by the manufacturer).

(How the BIOS gets to run, while the OS is running...)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Mode

The normal site for beep codes, would be bioscentral.com , but they may not
address runtime beep codes. And you can be sure the available product
documentation doesn't address the behavior either. I'd say many hours of
Googling are ahead of you, to find an answer.

You could load up a copy of Speedfan from almico.com and review temperatures
and voltage readings. And a copy of the free version of HDTune from hdtune.com
and read out the SMART results for the hard drive. Maybe you'll get lucky and
detect something out of sorts that way.

Paul

 

[Don Phillipson]

I was down at my sisters yesterday for dinner and she has a computer I built
for her about 4 or 5 yrs ago. XP Home edition, Retail-NOT OEM, 100g HD, 25g
free space. She said for about the last year or so, it has been been
occaasionally beeping one beep about every 5 min while it's running.
Computer boots and and runs fine although junked up with what I consider
totally useless "womans" stuff slowing it down. I freed up 15gig during my
checking.
I suspect possible ram because she said she may have, but can't remember, if
she put in more ram years ago and I can't remember either if I put in 1 or 2
sticks of 512 either when I built it.

We can verify RAM during operation via System Manager (Ctl Alt Del.)
But it takes less than 5 minutes to shut down, disconnect, unfasten
the case and have a look: this would also let us inspect for dust
bunnies (likely after 4 or 5 years operation, and a possible cause
of overheating -- cf. periodical alarm beep.)

 

[Russ SBITS.Biz [SBS-MVP]]

Ya Dust bunnies can get big just look
http://icanhascheezburger.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/funny-pictures-dust-bunny-under-bed.jpg
Russ

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