No display at boot time... Most of the time...

Greetings,

My friend came to to me with a rather simple problem, so it seemed... Hey, my family member had my computer for some time while I was away. She only had dial-up access and installed a modem. When I took it home, I wanted to take the card out so before I did, I turned on my computer but nothing came up. I figured that it could have been the modem, so I took it out, still the same problem. I found that if I was persistent enough and kept turning it off and on, finally something came up.

I suggested that we try to see if the on board video card had been shorted either in her care or his. So, we put in a standard PCI video card, still nothing, we got the on board display to work, some of the times. While in BIOS, we reset the default factory settings, it froze when we tried to A) save or B) save and exit. The BIOS would hang, with changes or nothing done to it, only when it came time to exit, save or the combination of the two.

We took out a stick of ram, tried to boot, nothing. We swapped the ram with the other, nothing. Unplugged the hard drive, CD-ROM: nothing.

Does anyone have an idea what is wrong? It worked for a while. He had it without the modem being taken out, and it had worked, no power outages had happened and it was plugged into a power strip. Any suggestions are welcome, I am trying to avoid just pronouncing it dead.

Thanks,

toor