PC won't start cold...

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marcfell27

Posts: 25   +0
This is a curly one.

My grandfathers PC (XP Home SP2) won't boot in the morning. The machine beeps for 7 and then silent for about 4 secs. (can't F8 or enter bios) It's an award bios. I've looked up beep codes for that bios and haven't seen one with that description.

The stranger thing is if you keep attempting to boot, it will eventually get a successful boot after about 30 mins of trying. After the machine has booted successfully you can then shut down and restart and it'll boot first time no problems. But the next morning same problem.

Old Pops thinks it's like an old car that needs to be warmed up, maybe a bit of choke could help :D

Here is what I've tried to no avail.

* Flashed the bios
* Tried different RAM
* Updated his Graphics Card (introduced him to the world of Flight Sim)
* Told him to never shutdown his PC ever again and there won't be a problem:confused: (he thinks it's unsafe to leave it running)

Any ideas??
 
Could you please post some specs? I think I read about some processors having problems if they get too cold. It does seem to me that it may be too cold, but that seems odd.
hoping to help
kitty500cat
 
Not sure what specs your after, but here are some.

Acer
Celeron 1.7ghz
Ram 512mb

If you could be more specific, that'll be good.
 
That's about the specs that I needed to know. but yeah, you could try warming the processor/motherboard up somehow and seeing if that helps, but I'm not sure how you would do that, unless you could raise the room temp. I bet if it is a cold problem it would heat up really fast if you removed the heatsink/fan assembly. :D (kidding, btw).
good luck figuring it out
kitty500cat
 
Did the problem occur before you updated the graphics card? The power supply might not have enough horses to spin up the drives and power the new graphics card all at once. You could try unplugging the cd rom drives, and any secondary hard drive or even a PCI card that you dont' absolutely need to boot. If it boots up then it may be a weak power supply.
 
The problem was occuring before the new graphics card, (I thought that might have been the problem)

Nothing changed once i replaced it, apart from better Graphics.
 
Friction creates heat, and you know how friction always works to get anything up and running - Not too much though, CPU may turn purple:p

Korrupt
 
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