If you hgave been foolhardy enough to venture into the Big Brother thread, you may have read i was having a few pc probs.
Not usually a problem, i'm pretty pc savvy, buying, selling, fixing the little beige boxes from hell for many years & i can honestly say i've never had probs like this before...

First a couple of weeks back my dvd-rom started refusing to eject when i hit the button, software eject commands from within windows didn't work either, it was as if there was no power getting to it, no lights no eject, nothing....but if a disk was in already...i could read it! Sometimes fine after re-boot.

Next i started getting a random single bleep from the pc, the book tells me all the beep codes...but none for 1 single bleep.

Then the screen started freezing, hdd & keyboard leds worked, just a frozen screen.

Then i started getting frozen screen with fixed HDD led lit up...again nothing else to do but re-boot.

Then i noticed the temp sensor taped to my hdd was getting pretty damn high...37degrees is pretty toasty for a drive to me!

Finally this morning i woke after a weary night watching silly people in a house, to discover my system was dead, fan in psu working but nothing else, no hdd light, no system light, no keyboard light, dead, dead, dead!

Now funds are a tad tight so the thought of building a new system with no dosh wasn't appealing, so i set too with hammer & crowbar!

Totally dismantled it, 4 hours work!
Put it all back together, had power to everything, but no picture...& now i was getting video error beeps from the thing!

Luckily the graphics card was under warranty so i sprinted off to the shop before it closed...sure enough the card was dead, so i got it replaced, came home & slotted it in.

Spot on!
No wierd beeps since, no problem (so far) with the dvd-rom, the hdd is running over 10 degrees cooler, screen hasn't frozen since, it's been on working & benchmarking for 7 hours error free.

I'm just amazed a graphics card could cause so many problems...i mean how does my graphics card affect my dvd-rom?


Hope i haven't just jinxed myself there?!

, dont worry. I had an old USB mouse that killed my pc to pretty much the same effect.

My Windows XP install started playing up, randomly freezing, not saving files etc. I reinstalled winblows, hoping that would fix it. The pc was pretty unusable at this time, after a fresh install. So i rebooted to have a check on the bios setup, and it died. Nothing but the PSU fan working. I spent nearly a day swapping around hardware from my brothers + mates pc's. RAM, HDD's, PSU, GFX card's, DVD Drives etc, Clearing the BIOS. Still no joy. Then i unplugged the mouse when i was putting my own stuff back in. Fired it up (Minus mouse), and everything was working bloody fine?!

Yes, i did take the mouse outside and let rip with my air-rifle. Bloody thing!



Come to think of it, my dad's pc has started doing this recently. I've had his drives in my pc, so i know they work fine. I might just convince him to shell out on something a bit newer though, his pc belongs in a museum. I could probably roll and smoke a fatty before it boots up .

*Disclaimer - No animals were harmed during the typing of this post.*

I downloaded the Beta version of Virtual Earth 3d the other day, that gave me hours of fun trying to sort out my PC. BTW.....love it

I had some problems where the keyboard/mouse was causing the PC to freezed. I have even had an entire PC running extremely slow & crashing and it turned out to be that the CD writer and gone faulty. I have also had obscure problems caused by a faulty power supply.

I love computers, but sometimes they do my head in

Faulty PSUs are a leading cause of weird, seemingly untraceable PC problems, especially if you have an egg-cooking Pentium 4 HT chip, or a humongous GFX card(s) - I always recommend that ppl spend a bit on a decent PSU (like an Antec or a Tagan, my personal favourites) when they spec out a PC. Just think how cheapo and nasty those PSUs must be in those £15-20 case + PSUs that you can buy.

Thats good thinking there Scibble, it is a large 400w psu in the box, but it is only what came with the case, i've used antec before & agree they are top quality...i think i'll stick one in just to be sure, as you say they can go a bit wierd at times & mine is 3 years old & on 24/7.

I have a little monitoring util that says all temps & voltages are ok, but as you say psu's are cheap to replace...well before they blow they are...after it usually takes out most of your system so gets a bit pricey!

Cheers for the tip mate!

I would agree with previous comments that faulty power supplies can cause weird faults. All my PCs over the past few years have given to me for spares etc. or have been thrown away due to being faulty and the first thing I've always done is to put in a new PSU. I tend to use cheap-ish 300w new PSUs because I have a supply of them and have only had one fail on me.




One of the strangest faults I had was due to a faulty ps/2 keyboard. The PC just hung when booting into windows. I traced the fault to a sticking key on the keyboard. There were no BIOS error messages or beeping from windows or anything.

Well "just to be sure" i bunged in an antec psu today...£25/400w...sorted....but its not!

Maybe it was the power supply or maybe the graphics card did more damage when it died..or maybe my motherboard is whacked...but now i've partially lost one of my only two PCI slots!
Bloody micro motherboards!

Only two damn slots, 1 used for wireless network card, the other i use for my cctv/dvr card. After the graphics card died the other day my dvr card was recognised but wouldn't work, just showed a still picture & gave me "Overlay Error" & "open Com" error.

Thinking it could be the dvr card i tried another i had with similar results, so i swapped it into the slot when the wireless card usually lives & it worked great, put the wireless card into the other slot & got connected..but no received data at all...sent packets were fine...but nothing coming back the other way!!??

Stuck an old soundblaster audigy in..again, sound out, but nothing on any input or mic lines.

Also i ran 3d mark 2006 on the new ATI 1650 graphics card with 512mb ram...expecting great things...instead i'm only getting 1 or 2 frames per second!!

So, i dug out my reciept for the m/board...YAY still under warranty...rang the shop...."Oh Socket 754 boards are obsolete now, you'll need AM2, with new processor & memory too!!!

Bollox!

Think it'll be ebay for a cheap socket 754 board!!


So much for the "how wierd, new graphics card & all problems sorted" thread!

Ah well, GB, never mind - the Antec will do you proud for a good while to come yet, and at least you'll be confident that it won't be your Chum Wa PSU that's to blame for any future ills - try a few different suppliers out - my trade one still has a few Socket A boards in their 'Bargain bin' section.

Just a thought, but have you tried cleaning the slots?

Sometimes dust builds up around the slots, both memory slots and card slots, and causes weird faults.
I use Isopropanol, or something similar, and an old toothbrush to clean them.

Old pentium IIIs, slot 1, seemed to be bad for this and some are designed so that the CPU fan blows dust onto one of the memory slots.