Trouble With Wife's PC - Help Me Keep My Home a Happy Place

I’m having an issue with my wife’s PC. It’s an older PC of mine that she is now using and is a conglomeration of newer and older components of mine through the years.

Symptoms: At random times her monitor would go blank and she would get a message stating signal cannot be found. Rebooting after some time would allow the PC to come back up as normal for a period of time and then go blank again at a later time. The frequency of this has increased over the past few weeks according to her. When the screen goes blank, the PC is still on and at times you can hear the hard drive head moving around as if it were accessing data as normal. There is no additional abnormal hard disk “chatter”.

Trouble shooting I have done thus far: Once I became aware of the issue a few days ago, I checked the connections, swapped out the monitor cable, blew a fair amount of dust off of the CPU heatsink/fan, checked the seating of the video card and other cables/connections within the case.

At this point it is very seldom when I have been able to get the PC to come up and now I am receiving 3 beeps immediately upon power up from the motherboard.

I am not sure if the problem lies with the processor whereas it may have been overheating due to the build up of dust on the heatsink and even though it is cleared off now, perhaps permanent damage has occurred. I am also concerned that the hard drive may be failing since that is the oldest component in the PC.

Can anyone provide any thoughts on what things I should hone in on first before I just go blindly swapping out components. Are the symptoms I am experiencing indicative of any one component failing? Thanks in advance, I appreciate any feedback.

It sounds like your first problem was the Vid Card - I would have suggested the cable, but you already tried that. Then you cleaned out the computer, and now the whole thing doesn't work, is that correct?

+1

Don't forget to test the RAM either. Try each stick by itself to determine if a stick has died.

The vid card does have a heatsink/fan on it and it is running fine. Off the top of my head I believe it's an XFX 8800. It's also the newest component in the box - not that that means that it could not be failing.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think any 8800 model should have a fan, at least a heatsink though....and if it's an 8800 and takes extra power connectors make sure those are plugged in, and not prone to come loose. On/off signals like that without the PC rebooting sounds more like a cable/connection problem rather than a component failure.

But definitely do stress tests on everything. I would suggest memtest and Prime95 as above, and maybe Furmark for the GPU stress test. And don't forget to check temps while stressing, as said above.