Various Booting issues

Imperialist

Distinguished
Oct 22, 2011
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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 :)