Hi all,
First off, I want to say that I'm not a noob. I've built 3 computers so far and they've all run smoothly.
Possible factors
1) As I shut down my computer last night, some error message popped up. It was too fast and I wasn’t able to read it before my machine shut down.
2) There was a lightning storm in the area. But I had turned off my surge protector.
3) I’ve been keeping my machine in a tight enclosed cabinet. But I’ve been pointing my fan at the cabinet to exhaust the hot air.
4) My video card has been artifacting like crazy in 3d games but works fine in 2d.
So I try to turn on the machine today. Nothing. Nada. The motherboard won’t post. The DVD light flashes, floppy light flashes, HD light flashes, then nothing. The HD clearly isn’t being accessed and the sequence of flashes is not the usual floppy, DVD, HD, sequence. There’s no signal to the monitor at all. Also, this being a crap Dell, the motherboard doesn't even have leds to tell me what's wrong.
The first thing I tried to do was replace the PSU. The new PSU didn’t change matters. Then I took out the CPU, cleaned the heatsink and applied AS5. Nothing. Checked all the wiring inside the machine. Everything’s plugged in like normal. I don't want to replace the mobo on a 4 year old machine. I might as well buy a new computer.
I mean, I didn’t do anything in between last night (when it worked perfectly fine) and today. I don’t understand how computers can be this fickle.
Help!
First off, I want to say that I'm not a noob. I've built 3 computers so far and they've all run smoothly.
Possible factors
1) As I shut down my computer last night, some error message popped up. It was too fast and I wasn’t able to read it before my machine shut down.
2) There was a lightning storm in the area. But I had turned off my surge protector.
3) I’ve been keeping my machine in a tight enclosed cabinet. But I’ve been pointing my fan at the cabinet to exhaust the hot air.
4) My video card has been artifacting like crazy in 3d games but works fine in 2d.
So I try to turn on the machine today. Nothing. Nada. The motherboard won’t post. The DVD light flashes, floppy light flashes, HD light flashes, then nothing. The HD clearly isn’t being accessed and the sequence of flashes is not the usual floppy, DVD, HD, sequence. There’s no signal to the monitor at all. Also, this being a crap Dell, the motherboard doesn't even have leds to tell me what's wrong.
The first thing I tried to do was replace the PSU. The new PSU didn’t change matters. Then I took out the CPU, cleaned the heatsink and applied AS5. Nothing. Checked all the wiring inside the machine. Everything’s plugged in like normal. I don't want to replace the mobo on a 4 year old machine. I might as well buy a new computer.
I mean, I didn’t do anything in between last night (when it worked perfectly fine) and today. I don’t understand how computers can be this fickle.
Help!