Blank screen and computer is beeping.

[Taylor9582]

My uncle builds computers and he built me a brand new one about 2 years ago. It's worked really well for both years until now. I was off for Thanksgiving vacation for a week and I left the computer on for the whole week. Usually the computer is perfectly fine to stay on for long periods of time and never shuts down or needs restarted. About the third day it was on, it froze and needed to be restarted. Over the last 4 days, it needed to be restarted about 3 more times. I figured it was just because I was on it a lot and saving a lot of work on it. On Tuesday night, I decided to shut it down before I went to bed. When I went to shut down, it said that all of the programs that were currently running were having trouble shutting down (my fire wall, instant message, and internet explorer). I canceled all of those programs and when it didn't shut down after a half an hour, I finally just shut it down with the power button on the computer. The next afternoon when I went to turn it on and the screen that comes up (I forget what it's called) with the Energy Star thing and all of the writing in white on the black background did come up, and I'm pretty sure I saw a glimpse of the Windows XP loading screen, but I'm not 100% sure. Then the screen went blank and the computer let out one loud, long beep. I have sort of bad memory, so I just thought that I forgot to turn on the screen so I turned it on and off a few times, thinking it would come up. Then I made sure that the orange light that indicates the screen being on was lit up, and it was. I turned off the computer and waited about 30 minutes. I started it up again and the screen didn't come on at all, and all it did was beep, it would let out one beep that lasted about 5 seconds, stop for about 10 seconds, let out another for 5, and stop for 10, etc. It doesn't stop beeping. We looked and made sure everything was plugged in outside and inside of the computer, and it was. We didn't add anything extra to the inside of the computer. We looked at the motherboard and saw a tiny blob inside of it, but we're not sure if that's the problem. We called my uncle and he looked up beep codes, but said he couldn't do anything until he saw the computer. I started looking things up and it said to check the BIOS, so I found the BIOS chip inside the computer and it said Phoenix BIOS D886 BIOS 1998 190854827. I researched what the beeps meant for that particular chip, and all of them come up as patterns as 1-1-2-1, etc. but never the pattern that I have, which is just 1 long beep lasting for 5 minutes and then pausing before starting another beep. A website also said that it might be something between the monitor and computer, but I'm not sure. We checked the memory sticks and none of them are burnt out. Any ideas of what's wrong? Thanks a bunch. -Taylor

 

[DonNagual]

When you say you checked the memory sticks, what do you mean? Did you test them in another machine?

Continuous beep code is sometimes a hard one to diagnose. Top suspect is your ram, followed by your PSU, video card and mobo itself.

To test your ram, either try some other ram in your system, or try the ram you have, in a known working system.

To test your PSU (assuming you don't have a voltmeter), replace it with a known working one.

Sounds frustrating, but that's what you are going to need to do, and if you don't have the spare parts to mess around with, you'll have to take her into a shop and let the pros fix you up.

Good luck!

 

[Taylor9582]

We're planning on taking it over to my uncle who built it. But from what he last said he couldn't find anything and I find the BIOS and Beep codes. Thanks a bunch, I'll tell him to check all of that. I'm also wondering if someone might know why I'm getting a pattern that isn't around on the Internet, I've looked everywhere on all kinds of search engines, and all of the ones with Phoenix beep codes don't have anything for just 1 beep lasting for 5 seconds.

 

[DonNagual]

Your system is probably a phoenix/award bios. And the award bios beep codes are a little trickier to diagnose, as the codes seem to vary greatly depending on each motherboard maker.

But a long beep code is usually a memory error, that's where I'd start looking.