Hey all, normally I'd have a much more specific problem, but I don't know where to start diagnosing this. My comp started crashing occasionally about a month ago. The screen would go black, and the comp would be frozen (I couldn't put it to sleep or get the HDD's to do anything, as far as I could tell). It always happens while using windows media player, and I'm pretty sure always when it's switching between full-screen and windowed. Strangely enough, it always seems to happen around midnight, but I'm just chalking that up to coincidence right now. I changed from Catalyst drivers to Omega drivers, and the problem happened less frequently after that, but still occasionally. Last night, it did the same thing, except this time it wouldn't turn back on. The monitor doesn't recieve any signal. At first I assumed that it was the video card, but I don't get any 'beep' at POST. The optical drives spin up if there is a disk in it, and the HDD light flickers a little, but no POST and no 'beep' at all. I don't know where to start diagnosing this, since I have no extra components to swap in, and nobody I know has a rig that I can test my components in. Anybody know what my first step should be? My first thought is to do a jumper-reset of my BIOS. Any reason I shouldn't? My CPU is overclocked from 2.4 to just under 3.6, but it never crashes at high loads, only when it's using windows media player, and the CPU is pretty much idle. All my temps are within safe limits, at least last time I checked. If resetting the BIOS doesn't help, then I'm at a loss as to where to start diagnosing. Thanks in advance for the help; any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. EDIT: Here are my specs: Motherboard: ASUS P5W DH Deluxe CPU: Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz running @ 3.55GHz RAM: 2gigs Dual Channel DDR2 Team Xtreem PC6400 @ 4-4-4-8 Hard Drive: 2X Seagate 320GB 16MB cache 7200RPM in RAID0 Heatsink: Big Typhoon Case: Ultra Aluminus Power: Ultra 550W Modular Powersupply Graphics: ASUS ATI X1950 Pro Optical: BenQ DW1620 & Pioneer DVR-111D Moniter: LG 20.1" Widescreen L204WT
Update: So I cleared the CMOS by removing the battery and switching the jumper, and it doesn't seem to have helped anything. I still get nothing on the monitor when I power on, and there is no BIOS 'beep'. I have no idea where to go from here. Has anyone got an idea of what I could try next, or what component might be failing?
Unfortunately no... I figure the problem lies either in the MOBO or the power supply, due to the lack of a beep during POST, but I don't really have a way to confirm or deny that at the moment.
Update: A revelation... I tried booting with no RAM, and got a repeating sequence of three beeps. Not sure if that means that the MOBO is working, but it's more life than it showed before. Not sure what to attempt now though.
Turns out that the problem was the RAM. It appears that one of the chips died, since it'll boot with one of the DRAM in, but not the other. That was espensive ram too... I wonder what would have caused that. If I just buy another 1 gig chip, will it work properly in dual channel with the other one that I still have?
Good to see that you found the problem. As ddp said, try to match what you have there now. Also, did you try the other stick in that same slot that let the computer boot up? And, did you try both sticks in the other slot to see if it is a RAM problem or a slot problem?
even if you are not doing much if it's overclocked, it's still stressing the components.you probably have lost the ram due to heat and stress
Yeah, I tried swapping the sticks into different slots. It's definately one of the ram sticks. Could have been much worse... at least my computer can still compute with one stick of ram. It likely was the overclocking... though I was barely overclocking the RAM at all. It's rated between 2.0 and 2.2V, and I was only running it at 2.1V. I think I'll just stick with overclocking the CPU from now on, since the benefit from overclocking the ram is barely noticable anyway. Thanks for the help guys!
