No display on monitor

Upon starting the computer does not beep and nothing on monitor. It has done this before and I just had to restart to get it to work, but now nothing. It has XP OS, dont know other specs right. Any help would be great!! Thanks

 

Is this a new build?

What are the specs?

 

Hi,I would give your machine a good clean out, open the case and use a can of compressed air to blow out all the crap especially heatsink fan, remove RAM and Graphics card(if it is not "onboard"--if the card is on board try a pci/pcie card in an available slot) clean gold contacts of the ram and gpu with either an eraser or alcohol wipe and re-seat firmly. have you tried a different monitor,just to rule out faulty monitor. You say there is no beep at start up of your machine, it may be that your motherboard has "bit the dust"(died).
iain.t :major

 

It was given to us, so don't have other specs right now.

 

Do you KNOW if it was working before you recieved it?

It could a few things.

Faulty ram or ram in the wrong slots.
Dead/dying power supply
Lose connection
Bad graphics card (if you have one, if you do try another or try the onboard graphics)

 

Its a desktop, yes tried another monitor, but nothing...don't have any canned air at the moment but will try to get some soon.

"it may be that your motherboard has "bit the dust"(died)."

Don't like the sound of that!!

 

"it may be that your motherboard has "bit the dust"(died)."

Don't like the sound of that!! [/QUOTE]

I recently had a friends go the same way!!! his was an acer aspire and I tried all of the suggested remedies but had to replace the motherboard. depending on what type of board it is most are pretty cheap to replace."BUT" it may be that it just needs a good clean out and the RAM re-seating!!! or a new GPU.
iain.t :major

 

Yes it worked when we got it. We have used it and it would work good just on start up sometimes it would not do anything just like now, so we just shut off the power and restarted it, but now that doesn't even work.

 

Try this, take out the kettle plug at the back, hold the power button for 30 seconds, plug it back in and try again.

 

Didn't work!

 

Are you at least getting the fan on the power supply running?

If you do have the fan running try taking out all RAM modules and restarting. See if you get a long beep.

 

Yeah, there's 5 fans in this unit, all come on when you turn on the power, also MB lites etc. come on!

When I take the RAM out and turn on the power it beeps a long second then off then long beep again and repeats!!

Am I getting closer??!!

Thanks for all the replies!!!

 

sach2,

Just thought I'd ask about this again to try to fix it for my son before I take the drive and memory out to maybe try to add to one of our other computers!

It seemed to do what you had thought it might!!

Or any others that may know!! Thanks Again!!

 

Sorry, I must have missed your original reply.

It seems it is not entirely dead. Try disconnecting the HD(s) and CDROM(s). Have the keyboard connected. Then you can try to boot with just one RAM module at a time. If two different modules don't work in the first slot then try each module in the second slot.

 

Thanks I'll give that a try!!

 

We did as you said, in which was to remove the HD and CDROM DRIVE, in addition, the floppy drive was taken out too. We then ran a total of 4 tests:
Test 1: 1st RAM in 1st slot: Nothing happens
Test 2: 2nd RAM in 1st slot: Nothing happens
Test 3: 2nd RAM in 2nd slot: Nothing happens
Test 4: 1st RAM in 2nd slot: It kept on beeping until we shut it off.

I hope that this is useful to you in helping us solve our problem.

Thanks again, sach2

 

So here is what happened, when the machine made that beep sound after plugging in the other monitor I decided to take that card out of the slot(I hadn't tried that before because I'm still new with working on these things) anyway I took an eraser to the connections to clean them, then reinstalled it and after a couple tries it started to work! :celebrate

But now it says it needs a system restore and it wont let me do it, so that will be but on another thread for some help!!

Thanks for the replies!

 

Sorry again, it looks like I am not getting notices to this thread for some reason.

I'm glad you kept at it and got a good result. Looks like iain.t had that idea way back when. I think I would have missed the answer and been stuck troubleshooting the RAM.

 

Yeah, I was just to worried to mess it up more when that was suggested, so I didn't do it then!

But I figured its broke may as well try it, specially after hearing that beep!!

Thanks iain.t!!

 

Thanks!!! sometimes it can be a bit daunting when it comes to delving inside the case, the more you do it the more confident you become, you just need to be carefull that you don't dislodge anything and make sure you are static free!!

iain.t :major