Hi Guys,
My wife's parents have my old Abit BH6 with Cel300a @ 450mhz etc. The computer performed flawlessly for years until I finally decided to give it to them. They have now had it for a year or two and have generally had no problems except when they decide to move the computer to another room. For whatever reason this invariably screws up the delicate balance that exists in this system and things don't work until I visit and fix them. Of course they are a good 3hrs away so visiting to spend 1hr fixing the comp sucks, but trying to fix it remotely is not going so well this time.
Once again they have moved the computer. The symptoms are as follows: immediately upon turning the machine after moving it on she got nothing on the CRT, not even the video bios boot. She reseated the AGP card and got the normal 2 lines of text from the VGA card, so it seemed like that was working. At this time the cursor would continue blinking and yet the machine would not continue to boot. She has half a clue about computers so I told her to reseat all the PCI cards, the memory, the IDE cables (at both ends), and finally the CPU. After all this, she was back at square one, no video bios boot text; reseating the AGP card yet again fixed this, but ultimately it seems like reseating etc did absolutely nothing.
Essentially, the machine will not boot at all. It seems like the failure is occuring immediately following the video bios, before/at the start of the system bios. I am hoping that perhaps someone has a thought for what the next step would be for attempting to get this machine to boot.
If I was there and had spare parts etc, I'd test the AGP card, memory, cpu etc to ensure they were functioning, and simply rebuild the machine from scratch. Unfortunately that is not going to happen without a personal visit. Any thoughts?? It sounds like "new computer from Dell" time to me but of course they don't generally have that much spare cash around.
TIA.
My wife's parents have my old Abit BH6 with Cel300a @ 450mhz etc. The computer performed flawlessly for years until I finally decided to give it to them. They have now had it for a year or two and have generally had no problems except when they decide to move the computer to another room. For whatever reason this invariably screws up the delicate balance that exists in this system and things don't work until I visit and fix them. Of course they are a good 3hrs away so visiting to spend 1hr fixing the comp sucks, but trying to fix it remotely is not going so well this time.
Once again they have moved the computer. The symptoms are as follows: immediately upon turning the machine after moving it on she got nothing on the CRT, not even the video bios boot. She reseated the AGP card and got the normal 2 lines of text from the VGA card, so it seemed like that was working. At this time the cursor would continue blinking and yet the machine would not continue to boot. She has half a clue about computers so I told her to reseat all the PCI cards, the memory, the IDE cables (at both ends), and finally the CPU. After all this, she was back at square one, no video bios boot text; reseating the AGP card yet again fixed this, but ultimately it seems like reseating etc did absolutely nothing.
Essentially, the machine will not boot at all. It seems like the failure is occuring immediately following the video bios, before/at the start of the system bios. I am hoping that perhaps someone has a thought for what the next step would be for attempting to get this machine to boot.
If I was there and had spare parts etc, I'd test the AGP card, memory, cpu etc to ensure they were functioning, and simply rebuild the machine from scratch. Unfortunately that is not going to happen without a personal visit. Any thoughts?? It sounds like "new computer from Dell" time to me but of course they don't generally have that much spare cash around.
TIA.
