ok so i got a dell xps from my cousin and i set it up but no images appear on the monitor i looked at the vid card and all the wires it all is connected and there is no scorch marks from a power surge but the hard drive makes a mild humming sound for the first few seconds of being on so any suggestions would be help full

Are sure your monitor even works?

At the very minimum, you should get the "Dell" BIOS splash screen when you turn your computer on. Do you get that at least?

Also, do you have any CD or Floppy Disks in the computer? Sometimes the computer can try to load an operating system off of those disks first. Try removing the floppy or CD from the drive if you have one inserted.

im sure it works i just had it sent to me a couple of days ago from my cousine i was using at his place a week ago or so. there are no disks in the cd drive and nothing comes up on screen ??

Zero, check the monitor on a different computer. I donot know how u received the computer but i do know monitors can be ruined in moving.

This is John from Dell headquarters.

If your monitor is not showing any images at all, that sounds to me like a problem with the monitor. Most of our monitors will begin the monitor self-test when there is no signal, and this would show a floating image on the screen. If you're not getting that, it doesn't bode well. What model is this monitor? I can double-check on the self test feature of that model to tell you what you should see.

John
Dell Customer Advocate