Oh, bollocks.

Desktop's just gone "phhht".

Took the CPU heatsinkoff cos the PC kept turning itself off, cleaned
the filth off, and refitted.

Noted poor performance, so checked "system".

512MB of RAM?

Opened up the side, tried to click memory thing back in place, and it
went dead.

No picture on monitor, no apparent boot up sequence being initiated.
All fans runing happily.

Are there any fuses or similar in there?

Or have I just killed the hard disc again?

 

Unlikely to be HD. Sounds far more terminal. CPU or mobo, but try
unplugging it from the mains for a few minutes and trying again.

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www.cuore-sportivo.co.uk

 

Check all your ribbons incase you dislodged something ,if you had
fucked the memory or hard disk it would tell you when you tried to boot
up

--

 

Do me a favour - it getting the dust out the heatsink.

On. Yes. I *know*, okay?

Woot.

 

If you're getting no beeps then it's either something trivial or it's
proper fucked.

If the fans spin up then there's no electrical short - the PSU does a
quick check and won't supply power if it finds things amiss.

Check it's all seated properly (particularly the PC speaker), with the
power off, and if you still get no joy then I'd suspect you've
knackered the motherboard. That would explain the BIOS not doing it's
thing and beeping error codes at you.

 

I try to avoid opening the beasts up at all unless absolutely necessary.
<pats ancient Dell which has been reborn and as a 'torrent box' by
inserting an ethernet card and running a new OS...>
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+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Pete Fisher at Home: |
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| Gilera GFR * 2 Moto Morini 2C/375 |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+

 

Try disconnecting from the mains for a few seconds

There's an outside chance one of the PSU outputs has gone into foldback
and shut down

else ... prolly not good news

 

Oddly enough newspaper, which is both oily and slightly abrasive, has
been used for this very thing in the past. Although in the past they
did not lay the gold on quite as thin as they do today.

 

assuming one has wireless connectivity...

 

I'm gonna do that. While I'm at it - there doesn't seem to be much
support for Socket 478 processors any more.

Worth going up Dual-Core? (LGA775)

 

With the PC on? Ballsy.

Nah not the HD, it would boot to bios at least. I had a PC once that when
fiddling the bios and stuff would sometimes display symptoms like this,
oddly, unplugging the power cord from the PSU and then unplugging the PSU
from the motherboard, then putting it all back together again seemed to fix
it. Worth a shot before you call it terminally dead I'd have thought. If
the fans are powering though, you at least know the PSU is good - are the
fans plugged into the motherboard or on seperate plugs from the PSU?

 

Thick

 

Steady on, Bruce.

 

Yup, I would say so, I hate to say this as well (having been in the Intel
camp most of my life), but the Athlon 64 X2 chips are pretty good value atm.

I've spent the last week sysmark benchmarking the whole AMD range on a
couple of boards based on the new nvidia mcp61s chipset.

Very impressed with performance and notably the stability, been swapping in
and out about 20 different processors (athlon/sempron/X2s) and running
sysmark/pcmark/cinebench on the system. I've not had any odd
glitches/lockups/bsods at all which is very suprising.

 

Duh, MCP63S is what I meant (Nvidia nForce 630a + Geforce 7050).

 

Ta.

I've decided to take the "bollocks to it" approach, and go buy summat
else.

I'm also thinking of getting one of they USB disc-caddy things to get
the stuff out of the old box.

 

Yes sah!

 

Salad Dodger wrote:

Can someone point out any obvious flaws in this beastie?

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/

Product code 656048

"It's from PCWorld" aside.

 

It comes with Vista.

 

Salad Dodger wrote:

.... and it works lovely on the second disc. Piece of cake.

The other one shows up in "system" but not on "my computer" - is this
"master boot record" related?

Any solutions?