- Jan 10, 2012
- 138
- 0
- 18,690
I built a PC with a friend a year ago. It was for him he hand-picked the parts himself. The computer has worked totally fine for 11 months until in the beginning of the month it would refuse to boot up sometimes. This would be resolved by rebooting a few times and the PC would work just fine from then on.
Last week the PC wouldn't boot up at all anymore. My first instinct was that his very old screen was breaking down as my friend is not the tech-savviest guy in the world and I had had a similar problem with my monitor that it would lose signal when turned on.
Yesterday I went to my friend's place to see what's up. We tried two different cables (HDMI and DVI-VGA) and two different monitors but that didn't help. I opened her up and tried figuring out if something was wrong inside. All the fans were working normally, all lights and buttons on the MOBO were working - these included MOBO stand-by light, faulty RAM LED, BIOS button that was supposed to boot the computer straight to BIOS or shut down the PC when it was running. Obviously only the latter one worked. There was never any signal on the monitor: no splashscreen or anything. Also there may have been a post beep earlier but now there was no such thing to be heard.
I tried booting with only one stick of RAM and changed the power cable on the GPU. Unfortunately the MOBO is so low-budget that it doesn't have any video output, with which I could've ruled out a faulty GPU.
Now this is where I run out of ammo. I have no idea how to continue troubleshooting. To me it seems that pretty much anything could be broken: MOBO, CPU, GPU. Probably not RAM since the faulty RAM LED wasn't blinking for a faulty RAM.
My friend was also concerned that since he has a pirated Windows 7 that could be the cause for no booting. But I don't really see any way how that could work. And I have never heard that something like that could be possible.
There is a theoretical possibility that I could try my own GPU if it starts working with that but it is a big hassle. How to proceed? Any ideas what might be wrong? Obviously he can't just buy all new PC and expert's help costs a lot.
Apologies for the low-res pic of the part list.
http://gyazo.com/6a4432a49b5ec9cfbdf18438bd7f2226
Thank you in advance!
-mon4ro
Last week the PC wouldn't boot up at all anymore. My first instinct was that his very old screen was breaking down as my friend is not the tech-savviest guy in the world and I had had a similar problem with my monitor that it would lose signal when turned on.
Yesterday I went to my friend's place to see what's up. We tried two different cables (HDMI and DVI-VGA) and two different monitors but that didn't help. I opened her up and tried figuring out if something was wrong inside. All the fans were working normally, all lights and buttons on the MOBO were working - these included MOBO stand-by light, faulty RAM LED, BIOS button that was supposed to boot the computer straight to BIOS or shut down the PC when it was running. Obviously only the latter one worked. There was never any signal on the monitor: no splashscreen or anything. Also there may have been a post beep earlier but now there was no such thing to be heard.
I tried booting with only one stick of RAM and changed the power cable on the GPU. Unfortunately the MOBO is so low-budget that it doesn't have any video output, with which I could've ruled out a faulty GPU.
Now this is where I run out of ammo. I have no idea how to continue troubleshooting. To me it seems that pretty much anything could be broken: MOBO, CPU, GPU. Probably not RAM since the faulty RAM LED wasn't blinking for a faulty RAM.
My friend was also concerned that since he has a pirated Windows 7 that could be the cause for no booting. But I don't really see any way how that could work. And I have never heard that something like that could be possible.
There is a theoretical possibility that I could try my own GPU if it starts working with that but it is a big hassle. How to proceed? Any ideas what might be wrong? Obviously he can't just buy all new PC and expert's help costs a lot.
Apologies for the low-res pic of the part list.
http://gyazo.com/6a4432a49b5ec9cfbdf18438bd7f2226
Thank you in advance!
-mon4ro
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram