2 Things that are pissing me off at the moment

[adidas]

1. Power Outage.

WTF??

I work about an hour from where I live and work never once lost power through this whole ordeal. My power went off at ~4 pm. It didn't come on until about 36 hours later. My neighbors, who live about fifty feet from me, had power in five hours. So did friends and family of mine.

2. Computer Upgrades.

I have some upgrades I got from a friend, and the damn thing won't boot with the new mobo and processor. I've been trying my hardest to figure out what is wrong and I've only been able to get it to display something on the monitor once. I haven't been able to get anything on the screen again, though I know the exact configuration when I got it to 'almost' boot.

The video card is fine too. I put my ol' reliable P3 back together using the new (new to me) video card.

Anyway, I don't expect help on getting it working--I'm just venting.

[Silverhaze]

Dude you sure that MOBO is ok?

I remember putting a hairline fracture down the middle of one once and all I could get was a red, green and blue test screen.

The thing worked for a little while and then just broke down entirely to the test screen thing.

[adidas]

It worked last week

[KoHC]

Power outage sucks, paying high electric bills every month here at California is even worse. I'm paying almost $200 a month this summer!

About your computer, what kind of motherboard/cpu is it? Also, what kind of video card? Many new motherboards out today will not take old video cards (AGP 1.0). You must have AGP 2.0 or AGP 3.0 video card in order to get it to work. If you have old PCI video card plug it in and see if it's the card's problem.

Also, some motherboards are picky what kind of RAM you use. You might want to check on that as well.

[Silverhaze]

Thats exactly what happened to mine.

It worked for a while after I'd put the fracture in by pushing a sound card a little to hard and then just started to break down. It started by windows mysteriously crashing and then after a couple of days all I could get was that test screen. Not even a mem check.

[adidas]

Power outage sucks, paying high electric bills every month here at California is even worse. I'm paying almost $200 a month this summer!

About your computer, what kind of motherboard/cpu is it? Also, what kind of video card? Many new motherboards out today will not take old video cards (AGP 1.0). You must have AGP 2.0 or AGP 3.0 video card in order to get it to work. If you have old PCI video card plug it in and see if it's the card's problem.

Also, some motherboards are picky what kind of RAM you use. You might want to check on that as well.

motherboard is a Micro-Star MS6380 Pro

the CPU is a AMD and I'm not sure of the exact model but it's clock speed is 1250 mhz

Yes this is not a 'fast' system but considering I'm using a P3 700 at the moment...

The video card is a Geforce 3 Ti200, and I am using 512MB of Kingston PC2100 (DDR)

Also, I found that if I clear the CMOS with the jumper setting I can get video. Windows will still not boot though.

On booting, the system complains that CMOS settings are wrong. I can try to change the settings, and when the system reboots I have no video.

I also have tried hitting 'F2' to continue booting with the default CMOS settings. Doing this results in Windows 2000 hanging just before the boot screen. Safe mode doesn't work and neither does booting from CD. After Windows hangs, naturally I have to reset. After resetting this way I have no video.

I have also tried a Geforce2 MX with no luck.

[KoHC]

In that case, we can rule out the AGP problem since Ti200 is AGP 2.0 card.

Try clear CMOS again, this time when it complains about wrong CMOS setting go into setup menu and choose "fail-safe" option. This should set everything to the lowest possible timing.

Do you have another stick of DDR RAM available for testing? Maybe the RAM isn't working properly.

Also, you might want to remove every cards in your system and leave just a video card. This will make sure it's not IRQ conflict between your cards.

[adidas]

No, I don't have any more DDR

And I don't have anything but the video card in the PC already

I might just take the thing somewhere and pay someone to do it for me

[KoHC]

bah, just bring it to your friend's house and borrow his computer parts for few min. All that'll cost you might be just few beers, beats paying computer shop for it. I'm not sure how much ppl charge around your area, but I charge $40-$75 an hour for that. And that's about the common price in California.

[release]

so do you run a computer store KoHC ?

[KoHC]

Nah, not anymore. Computer business is brutal in California. I'm just doing consulting on the side. The pay is good but the income is not stable enough.

[were]

[adidas]

Update:

I got the new system working. I got rid of the Micro-star board and got a Soyo KT600 Dragon Ultra

I was also misinformed about the CPU when he gave it to me

It is an Athlon XP 2000+

There are some tweaks I still have to make, and a peripheral or two to install still, but I am up and running.



Like I said, it is not a top of the line system but it is a step up from my P3 700.