So, what i have is a rather seemingly complicated problem with my girlfriends desktop. Ill start at the beginning. I cant physically help her at the moment as i am away, so i have to do so over the phone, and shes no expert (neither am i for that matter, but i know my way around the inside of a computer well enough)
One day she was playing a game, and her system abruptly shut off, and upon rebooting recieved the dreadful blue screen of death. From what she read to me, the error message entailed PCI.sys. At first i thought it was a windows error, so i had her wipe the hard drive, and reinstall windows XP. During installation however, the problem occured again, same error message. So she had a technician come over and he apparently told her a "nasty virus" had infected the boot sector of her hard drive. I knew this was crap right away, i had her flush the boot sector and perform repairs etc. I then sent her a hard drive out of my own desktop, and after some wire compatibility errors we got it to work. And then it happened once more and i knew there was a piece of faulty hardware somewhere in there. Fresh HD wouldnt have conveniently had the same exact problem on it (when i tested it before i sent it).
So the technician was full of crap. So, the next logical step, in my mind was to isolate the malfunctioning hardware (if it wasnt mobo related), so i had her remove all her ram but 1 stick, and run on bare minimum configuration. Now her monitor no longer receives a signal, and there is apparently an infernal beeping noise coming from the machine. Ive had her reset the bios, swap ram sticks around, i even had her put them all back in the same exact way they were. Nothing works and its driving her nuts. Any help would be appreciated
One day she was playing a game, and her system abruptly shut off, and upon rebooting recieved the dreadful blue screen of death. From what she read to me, the error message entailed PCI.sys. At first i thought it was a windows error, so i had her wipe the hard drive, and reinstall windows XP. During installation however, the problem occured again, same error message. So she had a technician come over and he apparently told her a "nasty virus" had infected the boot sector of her hard drive. I knew this was crap right away, i had her flush the boot sector and perform repairs etc. I then sent her a hard drive out of my own desktop, and after some wire compatibility errors we got it to work. And then it happened once more and i knew there was a piece of faulty hardware somewhere in there. Fresh HD wouldnt have conveniently had the same exact problem on it (when i tested it before i sent it).
So the technician was full of crap. So, the next logical step, in my mind was to isolate the malfunctioning hardware (if it wasnt mobo related), so i had her remove all her ram but 1 stick, and run on bare minimum configuration. Now her monitor no longer receives a signal, and there is apparently an infernal beeping noise coming from the machine. Ive had her reset the bios, swap ram sticks around, i even had her put them all back in the same exact way they were. Nothing works and its driving her nuts. Any help would be appreciated