Computer won't start! Help!

[pagejames]

Hi everyone. New to the forums and am having a major problem.

My computer was working fine on Thursday night. I turned it off, went to bed and when I woke up Friday morning, nothing. The power supply fan turns on and the lights for the two DVD drives flash on. The hard drive light goes on and stays on. There are no beeps, although I did hear a clicking sound.

I have a 2.4GHz P4, an Elite L4VXA2 motherboard and 512Mb ram.

At first I thought it was maybe(hopefully!) the monitor because the yellow standby light didn't turn green. Hooked up monitor to my laptop and it worked fine.

Then I tried switching out the AGP video card. No luck there either.

I switched out the memory. Still no dice.

Someone told me it was probably the power supply. Bought a new one. No change. Gonna return the new power supply.

I took the heatsink and fan off of the cpu to see if it gets warm. It does. If the cpu died, would it still get warm?

Where do I go from here? I don't want to go buy a new motherboard or processor and have to return those too if that's not the problem. When I had changed out the power supply, I noticed a clicking sound. It may have been there before and I didn't notice. Don't know for sure. Please help. Going through divorce and I need my financial info. off of my computer to fight the wicked witch of the west.

Thanks for any and all help.

 

[jakeshjo]

just trying to help

So you start your computer and it kind of starts but nothing comes on the screen is that what is happening? If it were the video card most likely you would get a series of either 6 or8 beeps indicating that problem. But of course you already tried that. A bad power supply can do that too. But you checked that. YOu don't get any kind of video at all? Does the memory test work? You know even though you get your yellow light on your monitor it could be that is the problem. You are writing this on someone's computer can you borrow their monitor and try it? jakeshjo

 

[pagejames]

I checked the monitor and it is working fine. As far as I can tell, the bios doesn't even boot. The screen just stays black like it isn't even turning on. It seems it never even gets to the memory test. I thought that if it was a memory or video problem, I'd get some kind of beeps or something, but other than the lights, it's just dead.

Thanks, Jakeshjo

 

[ChineseTechie]

Fisrt of all, sorry to hear that you are going through a divorce.

Are you certain that it's not your video card that's causing the problem?? Have you tried taking your video card to someone else's machine and see if it works?? Usually there are beeps when your mobo is not detecting the video card, but like mine, it beeps from the speakers. Strange, I konw. So it's not unusual if there's no beep and it still is a video card problem.

cT

 

[jakeshjo]

Well sorry to hear all this but now here is what I think is the bad news. Six months ago the same thing happen to my son out in college and I worked hard on it until we figured out that it was not the motherboard even, (bought a new one and didn't work) but it was the processor. We ended up getting a better Motherboard CPU combo to replace it because finding the old processor cost more than the combo upgrade. Sorry for the bad news but you just described your problems exactly like he did to me back then. Good Luck, jakeshjo

 

[mitbulls]

I had this problem with my Albatron K8x800 when I first built it. Are you sure your BIOS is fully up to date?

Try resetting the BIOS settings (take the battery out of the motherboard, best to leave it out overnight to be sure). Then put it back in and try turning on your computer. If it starts, update your BIOS settings immediately! You might only get one boot before it stops responding again (that's what happened to me). Good luck!