An apology first: Sorry for posting here, but no one really reads any other forums anyway :redface:
I have not had any hardware failures or system crashes in a very long time (at least two years). The only exception was when one of my hard drives died three months ago. This problem was obvious - loud, clicking noises and POST reporting inaccessible hard drive - so replacing the hard drive fixed the problem. My current system never crashed before. It never malfunctioned in any way except for the above hard drive incident. Therefore, I am a bit confused about what happened yesterday. It is something "new" (to me at least).
I was playing Knights of the Old republic. Everything was fine. Smooth gameplay, crash-free as always. No artifacts or weird graphics, no strange noises. No suspicious symptoms whatsoever.
Then, when I got tired of having fun I saved/exited the game and went into my display properties to check some settings. At this point the system froze before I even got to change any settings.. I figured it was a memory and/or page file issue since I was running the game for a good 5-6 hours straight. I thought Windows would recover. I gave it several minutes and when it became clear that it was indeed a lock-up I rebooted via power switch since Ctrl+Alt+Del did nothing - the system was frozen solid.
I thought that the problem was caused by overclocking the GPU (nV 5700U) and if this were indeed the case, during reboot you can press and hold Ctrl with nV cards to restore default clock speeds. I Tried this but the PC will not even POST.
Here are the symptoms:
1. On Failed POST motherboard does not produce ANY beeps at all.
2. The monitor is blank/black and its LED stays yellow indicating no video signal as if the PC power is off.
3. PSU fan works fine.
4. Power LED is ON.
5. Optical drives spin and blink fine.
6. Hard drive LED is ON but steady (no blinking), there is no audible hard drive activity.
7. CPU, GPU and case fans work fine.
8. Motherboard lights and NIC light are on.
The system was overclocked via software: FSB, AGP and PCI bus were all overclocked about 18%. My first suspicion was that I broke either the CPU or the video card. But there were no symptoms of any kind - no lock-ups, no instability of any kind, no artifacts...
Still, I have tried a few things:
1. Unplugged and reseated the IDE cables.
2. Replaced the CPU with the one that I know works fine.
3. Replaced the video card with the one that I know works fine.
4. Disconnected/reconnected the peripherals.
Nothing changed.
I have just read a bunch of things on POST troubleshooting just in case. <A HREF="http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000607.htm" target="_new">THIS</A>, for example. And <A HREF="http://www.computerhope.com/beep.htm#01" target="_new">THIS</A>.
It appears that I am having a case of "irregular POST beep code" - no beep at all. At this point I am thinking that maybe I killed my AGP or PCI bus. How can this be verified? Unfortunately, I have no way of testing my memory (PC-800 RDRAM).
Any ideas/suggestions? Thanks!
<font color=green>"The creative powers of English morphology are pathetic compared to what we find in other languages." (Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct)</font color=green>
I have not had any hardware failures or system crashes in a very long time (at least two years). The only exception was when one of my hard drives died three months ago. This problem was obvious - loud, clicking noises and POST reporting inaccessible hard drive - so replacing the hard drive fixed the problem. My current system never crashed before. It never malfunctioned in any way except for the above hard drive incident. Therefore, I am a bit confused about what happened yesterday. It is something "new" (to me at least).
I was playing Knights of the Old republic. Everything was fine. Smooth gameplay, crash-free as always. No artifacts or weird graphics, no strange noises. No suspicious symptoms whatsoever.
Then, when I got tired of having fun I saved/exited the game and went into my display properties to check some settings. At this point the system froze before I even got to change any settings.. I figured it was a memory and/or page file issue since I was running the game for a good 5-6 hours straight. I thought Windows would recover. I gave it several minutes and when it became clear that it was indeed a lock-up I rebooted via power switch since Ctrl+Alt+Del did nothing - the system was frozen solid.
I thought that the problem was caused by overclocking the GPU (nV 5700U) and if this were indeed the case, during reboot you can press and hold Ctrl with nV cards to restore default clock speeds. I Tried this but the PC will not even POST.
Here are the symptoms:
1. On Failed POST motherboard does not produce ANY beeps at all.
2. The monitor is blank/black and its LED stays yellow indicating no video signal as if the PC power is off.
3. PSU fan works fine.
4. Power LED is ON.
5. Optical drives spin and blink fine.
6. Hard drive LED is ON but steady (no blinking), there is no audible hard drive activity.
7. CPU, GPU and case fans work fine.
8. Motherboard lights and NIC light are on.
The system was overclocked via software: FSB, AGP and PCI bus were all overclocked about 18%. My first suspicion was that I broke either the CPU or the video card. But there were no symptoms of any kind - no lock-ups, no instability of any kind, no artifacts...
Still, I have tried a few things:
1. Unplugged and reseated the IDE cables.
2. Replaced the CPU with the one that I know works fine.
3. Replaced the video card with the one that I know works fine.
4. Disconnected/reconnected the peripherals.
Nothing changed.
I have just read a bunch of things on POST troubleshooting just in case. <A HREF="http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000607.htm" target="_new">THIS</A>, for example. And <A HREF="http://www.computerhope.com/beep.htm#01" target="_new">THIS</A>.
It appears that I am having a case of "irregular POST beep code" - no beep at all. At this point I am thinking that maybe I killed my AGP or PCI bus. How can this be verified? Unfortunately, I have no way of testing my memory (PC-800 RDRAM).
Any ideas/suggestions? Thanks!
<font color=green>"The creative powers of English morphology are pathetic compared to what we find in other languages." (Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct)</font color=green>