[sewildman50]

I am fairly certain I have some sort of hardware issue, though I'm having difficulty figuring out what it might be.

Last night, I took my PC downstairs to give it an overdue cleaning (had been about 6 months since last clean). I used some compressed air to clean out the CPU fan, the PSU, two ventilation fans, and gave the case interior a once over as well. I did not disconnect anything on the inside.

I then took the PC back up to the office, reconnected all of the appropriate external wiring and booted up. I got as far as the desktop, then the computer froze. I rebooted the computer and this time, after getting to the desktop, the screen went black except for about 8 thick white diagonal lines across the monitor.

I tried reseating the video card and booted a couple of times with the same results.

This morning, for a lark, I tried booting again.

The first time, I encountered a Post Code beep that was not discernible at first because there was a lot of little beeps all over the place, but then I believe I heard a long beep and a short beep repeating. I'm not 100% on this since it didn't happen again the second time. I looked at the code on the motherboard and while windows was crashing it displayed the code FF, which my mobo manual says is just a boot attempt.

The next time I booted, it booted to desktop and then the screen went black (with no diagonal white lines).

Given that I have only attempted to clean the dust out of my computer, can anyone tell me the most like problem?

My system specs are as follows:

Mobo: Abit AV8 3rd Eye (about 2 years old)
Processor: AMD Athlon 3200+ XP with factory supplied heatsink and fan; arctic silver compound used on initial installation about two years ago. Fan/heatsink and processor has not been removed since initial install.
Memory: 2 x 1GB Apacer PC 3200 DDR 400 (brand new)
Video: EVGA 7600 GT Superclocked (512mb; brand new)
Audio: Soundblaster Audigy (about a year old)
PSU: ATX 450watt (approx 2 years old)
HD1: 80 GB ATA (Master with windows)
HD2: 500 GB SATA (slave; has dual fan cooler attached).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Edited by sewildman50, 23 January 2008 - 11:41 AM.

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Hello, and welcome to Geeks To Go.
This may be a hardware related issue, (your hard drive is bad), but most likely you will find the answer here.
If the information in this article does not help fix your problem, we will look at the hardware issues.
Thank you.

[hfcg]

Hello, and welcome to Geeks To Go.
This may be a hardware related issue, (your hard drive is bad), but most likely you will find the answer here.
If the information in this article does not help fix your problem, we will look at the hardware issues.
Thank you.

[sewildman50]

Thank you for your reply. On the hunch that the issue was related to the video card, I put my old video card (GeForce FX 5500 256mb) back in the system and rolled back to a previous forceware driver (162.18) and the computer booted up just fine.

So the question is, what's wrong with the new video card? It is only two weeks old and had been working fine with forceware beta driver 169.28.

Edited by sewildman50, 25 January 2008 - 07:19 AM.

[hfcg]

Most likely the driver is conflicting with some software that is running.
However your video card may not work with some other hardware.
Have you added any programs or hardware in the past few weeks?
Why this happened when you cleaned your computer is a question worth asking. Did you loosen any wires or connectors?

[sewildman50]

As for the software side of things, I will have to check on that when I get home from work as I am constantly adding and removing programs.

On the hardware side, after adding the video card I installed two 1gb sticks of RAM (Apacer PC 3200 DDR 400). I was using a single 1gb stick of Buffalo PC 3200 DDR 400 but until I get a fourth gb I thought I'd use the two sticks of the same brand for dual-channel mode. Once again though, the PC was working fine for days in this configuration.

The only difference between the old card and the new is that the 7600gt requires a power supply. I am currently using an ATX 450 watt power supply. Currently plugged into the PSU is the mobo, two optical drives, two hard drives, the cpu fan, two additional fans on the case, and, when it was installed, the video card.

I suppose I could try reinserting the new card and see if it works with the older driver and I will ensure that everything is plugged in.

[sewildman50]

Problem seems to have been solved. But not without headaches.

Long story short, I rolled back to the current forceware driver release (non beta) and reset the CMOS. Seems to have worked. In the process I also sprang for a new 700watt modular PSU (it is sweet and long overdue).

Thanks for the help.