a tale of sorrow and woe

ok so my wifes computer has ben down for a while for various reasons. after finaly rmaing her HD and geting her a new cdrom(upgraded to a DVD writer) she installed everything today into a nice new case since she kept complaining about her old one. ok anyways long sotry short after geting it all hooked up and pluging it in it just kept beeping with no clue to why so i got home and noticed she didnt have her ram seated properly so i fixed that and reseated the agp gfx card. after pressing the power button the beep code is gone and the power switch isnt responding so i pull the side off and realise that she didnt install a single standoff and instead screwed the motherboard directly to the case.... ok so i pulled it put some standoffs in. now when i press the power to turn it on everything spins up lights come on and get no video output or beep codes... the chilling horror. ok so in your opinions how much of the hardware is at this point just throwaway. she said she had it on for about 5 minuits the first time. i ran it for about 30 seconds before powering it off. my dad has a socket A mobo with agp so i could go to his place and tear his computer apart to test everything but that wont happen for about a week. so if you were in my shoes what course of action would you take and how much of the system do you think is probably ready for the trash bin.

Whoa, let's use some sentence and paragraph breaks there, buddy. (Very difficult to read.)

I think it's too early to throw anything out, as the troubleshooting has been only haphazard thus far.

Remove everything, including removing the motherboard from the case. Then, remount the motherboard carefully, and reseat the minimum for POST + video: one stick RAM, CPU, and video card. Make sure to clear the CMOS. Make sure that the HSF is properly mounted with good thermal paste.

See if you can get that to boot. If not, then switch the RAM to another socket, as well as swapping the RAM. If you have a power supply to swap, you'd want to try that after trying all RAM combinations. You need to be systematic and use some logic to rule out what does and does not work.

Good luck -- Paul

sorry about the long run on rambling sentance above i had ben awake for far to long. i have allready removed the motherboard and remounted it properly with standoffs disconnected drives and atempted to post.

unfortunatly with that change i still got no results. i dont have any other agp or ddr siting around so ill have to wait untill i can head over to my dads and rip his computer apart and swap some pieces and test things out.

Sorry if I missed it somewhere, but are you using onboard video or a video card? If your board has onboard video, but your using a vid card, try enabling the onboard in the bios and remove the video card. See if anything happens then.

Possible that you shorted out the motherboard without using the standoffs. It happens.

Might as well wait to test all the stuff on the other rig you were talking about when you can.

If everything works fine on the otherboard, sounds like yours is toast.

yea prety sure the board atleast is gonzo, idk tho the power button response is dead on and everything else begins spinning up but no video happens. could be the card but then again who knows im gona try and test some of the gears on my dads computer hopfully monday or tuesday. its just a pita beacouse i dont have any computers other than hers that had an AGP slot, DDR, or slot A cpus fortunatly my dad is stubborn and hasnt upgraded his computer since we bumped him up to a duron 900 back when they were new.

Starting from your "last sentence" of everything turning on yet you had no beeps and video output I had the same problem a LONG time ago. It turns out I was having a problem with the mobo grounding to the case. To be sure everything was working I had to take the mobo out of the case, lay it on the box it came in and start it up like that. Turns out everything worked fine. It was bc I didnt have those stupid little paper washers....Im not saying im right but its worth a try.

sorry about the long run on rambling sentance

Click to expand...

Ah, no problem. I hope you didn't feel too teased; I was really only kidding.

Please do follow up and let us know how things are going. Did you try running with the mobo out of the case, as suggested?

Thanks, and good luck!! -- Paul