Help with Monorail PC!!

[jaggrey]

A friend's comp. In the beginning it would give garbled characters and random junk when you 1st turn it on at the 2nd POST screen (System Summary). It would freeze when installing Windows XP until I loaded the BIOS defaults. It worked fine in Windows XP for a little while...a couple of reboots later the display was in 16 colors. Now the thing doesn't get that far...it turns on but i get no picture on the screen.

Tried:
- Clearing CMOS
- Removing the CMOS battery and letting it sit for about half an hour
- Different video card
- Removing everything except for video card and memory
- Removing everything (it doesn't even beep!!)
- Different power supply

WTF?!

 

[jaggrey]

Apparently they don't do PCs anymore, according to their website. Even when I put everything back the way it was it still doesn't turn on.

 

[Gunbuster]

Bad ram, it has a 32 or 64 meg stick of apacer right?

 

[jaggrey]

Actually I think it was Apacer...that went bad earlier this year, but a while back we put some Crucial RAM in there. I just found out that one of the sticks is PC100 and the other is PC66, but the symptoms are the same no matter which stick is in there, or slot.

 

[jaggrey]

I'm gonna try a PCI video card. Any other ideas? Could it be processor?

 

[Gunbuster]

Try the other DIMM slot

IIRC the fan likes to blow dust right into the DIMM slot, the contacts may be dirty

Pop the CPU out and reseat it

Most problems were bad ram, but the MB was not great itself

Is the CPU fas spinning up?

 

[jaggrey]

There's no fan for the CPU....all it has is a heatsink. Celeron slot A - 400 MHz. I can't get it out the slot for nothin, and i don't want to break it.

I tried different DIMM slots...same thing.

I might suggest getting an ECS board and a Duron for around $100....worthy upgrade.

 

[jaggrey]

tried a new PCI video card....no dice. Startin to look like a mobo/processor upgrade.....

Any other ideas?