Tony broke my PC. He won’t tell me how it happened, but the symptom of the problem is that although the fans and drives power up, the BIOS won’t boot.
I can’t test what’s broken because I don’t have any spare parts. Should I assume that the motherboard is fried, or could it possibly be the CPU or memory? I’m guessing that since BIOS won’t even boot, it’s the motherboard, but I don’t know the symptoms of bad RAM or a bad CPU plugged into a perfectly good mobo.
Here’s why I’m asking: we went on vacation to Izu over the weekend and I want to edit the video of incredible Japanese beach babes. The way I figure, there might be a man or two in the audience who might be willing to help me out with some advice so I can get to the job at hand.
Is the monitor ok? You need to rule that out before you can be sure the BIOS is not booting (do you get the BIOS beep?) RAM wont be an issue unless BIOS shows it to be a problem on boot up. Of course if the CPU is fried, it wont boot the BIOS.
Time to get a new Mac — think of it as a message from the gods 😀
The monitor is OK. No BIOS beep.
Ah-ha, so it could be the CPU. It probably got too hot because the air conditioning in my wee little home office is broken. I’ve never tried to power up a mobo without the CPU, so I wasn’t sure if BIOS would boot without one or not. The mobo looks OK–no blown capacitors.
There’s no way I can afford a Mac. I can barely afford replacing whatever needs to be replaced in the PC I have.
Was the computer left on in the extra hot period? If not, that shouldn’t be it, since they can stand very hot temps in storage. BIOS (and nothing else) can boot if RAM isn’t working, or if CPU is broken.
Check to see that the RAM is properly seated. If the 9 year old knocked the computer off the table, the chips could have come unseated. Dropping could also crash the hard drive, but you would see the bios boot before the hard drive failure.
Do you know the power outlet is good, the power cable is plugged in at both ends? Start with the simple things.
Yes, it was left on overnight in a hot room with no ventilation.
So you’re saying the BIOS should boot even if the CPU is fried? Sounds like you’re saying yes and Lon is saying no. My uneducated guess is it will boot, but it’ll give an error along the lines of “no CPU detected.” In my case, I’m not getting anything at all. Nada.
opps! just re-read your original post. power is obviously getting there. So the memory chips are next most likely things.
The PC sits on the floor, and if he had knocked it over it definitely would have woken me up, since I have tons of junk piled on top if it.
BIOS is just the initial bootup program, in firmware, that needs a functioning CPU in order to run. One other thing (relatively inexpensive) to try would be to replace the lithium battery on the motherboard.
I’ve never heard of a PC not being able to boot becuase the lithium battery died. Are you sure about that? I thought that when the battery dies the internal time clock simply stops working.
One of these days I need to find a beater mobo and experiment with ways to make it stop working.
depending on the age of the mobo — some BIOS versions need what is in powered parameter memory. yes, the clock is one of the values, and in theory the BIOS should boot with default values, but on more recent boards the power management systems have gotten quite complex (read fragile)
surely there is a shop/store you can bring the board to and ask them to flex their geek muscles and tell you what is wrong 🙂
Yeah, I’m probably going to have to swallow my pride and pay the the professionals to look at it. From past experience, it’s probably going to cost more than whatever needs to be replaced. That’s why even slightly broken home electronics end up in the trash here. It’s often cheaper to replace something than it is to get it repaired.
Before shelling out buku amounts of cash to get something simple repaired… I would disconnect everything that isn’t needed. All disk drives, hard drive, mouse, keyboard… I helped out with computer trouble in my high school a couple of years ago, and I found a computer that wouldn’t boot because the pins in a mouse were crossed and touching each other. I’m assuming it was causing a short somewhere along the lines.
Your video card or integrated video could be the issue as well…although i’m not sure how to troubleshoot that off the top of my head.
Take stuff out and put it back it. Make sure all of the connections are firmly in place before giving up.
Hope some of that helps. Good luck!
How much are you looking to get for your son? Is he the one that urinated in the closet?
hahaha, I forgot about that incident.
No, his younger brother is the one who angrily peed in the closet.
How do you know he broke it? It takes some advanced skills to do it without your notice.
He left it on overnight, went back on it the second after his mother left for work, somehow restarted it (that’s the vague part) while I was still in bed, and after that it wouldn’t reboot.
But really, I was looking for a good excuse to beat him anyway.
Have you tried resetting the bios using the jumper on the mobo? Check your manual if you’ve got it for how to do this, if not google it. Alternatively try removing the CMOS battery for 10-15 minutes.
This isnt exactly relevent, but I also have a problem and since it pertains to podcasting I thought maybe some listeners could help. I know that if you listen to a podcast on itunes, and then put it into your ipod, the ipod will have the bookmark of where you left off while listening to itunes.
The question I have is, is there a way to bring the bookmark of where you have listened to the podcast on your ipod back into itunes?
Thanks.
If that specific podcast is set to “Remember playback position” (in the options pane of the get info menu item (right click on the podcast in iTunes or control-click with one button mouse to get context menu where “get info” appears), then when you sync the iPod your playback position will be updated in iTunes (from your iPod) or visa-versa depending on which was the most recently listened to source
I am running the latest version of iTunes and all of my podcasts have the playback position option turned on. It still does not sync back to itunes : Itunes will remember the position the podcast was playing on iTunes. Ipod will remember the position the podcast was playing on iPod. Itunes will send the play position from iTunes to the iPod, but the iPod still won’t send the play position from iPod back to iTunes 🙁
Its really annoying because I only listen to podcats on my iPod and not on my pc, and when I go to update my podcasts on my ipod, I can never tell which podcasts I have listened to or not, because on iTunes it says they are all unlistened to.
odd — both 3rd Gen and 5th Gen iPods have no problems with this – we listen to a lot of books on the road and at home, so we find the position remembering quite useful.
Are you using iTunes for Windows or Mac? (I only have macs here)
Im using windows at home, macs at school. I wonder if maybe windows doesnt have the function, or if that switching the ipod between both OS’s is affecting it.
The BIOS is just a program that runs on the CPU, so no, it will not load the BIOS without a CPU.
Modern processors shut down themselves when they overheat to protect from damage, so overheating shouldn’t be a problem.
Does the motherboard not give any POST error beeps? That’s bad. My guess is that it could be the power supply, motherboard, CPU.
I vote for ripping everything out (memory, etc) and with just mouse, keyboard, monitor, try booting up with all extensions off. Either the mobo’s toasted and wont boot, or it’s something else and will boot. Or the mobo is slightly toasted and will half-ass boot enough to see what’s what.
Did your son perhaps yank the power cord out to restart/shut down the computer? I’m guessing he did something to send a surge through it…ah! Could the power button or reset button possibly be stuck? Try removing the faceplate and seeing if one of the buttons is jammed, or remove the reset button cable from the motherboard, and try the power button.
I’m trying to narrow it down to how restarting the machine could have caused this, and both of those things I’ve mentioned above have happened to me.
Best of luck, and by the way, great ploy for free tech support!
if the system is an amd then it could be the processor, intel cpu’s don’t tend to fry themselves but to me it sounds like the motherboard, you should try to reset the cmos.., if he was messing around in the bios settings he could have easily messed something up.
on your motherboard probably near the battery , there might be two pins and written next to it on the motherboard ‘clear cmos’ or something similar. tap them together with a screwdriver or something.. this will run failsafe settings and you might be lucky.
if you don’t have those pins, check your motherboard manufacturers site , or motherboard manual, take your battery out and touch the two bits of metal together this will discharge your bios memory .. same deal, a little dodgier but not too bad.
had a look at all the resistor in the thing? one can be fixed rather cheaply if you do it yourself… or have a look at the connections inside the computer…
getting a computer fixed can cost and arm and a leg… In our computer hardware class we are going to be looking at some computers… the teachers already told us that You don’t wanna get a Mac, cause nobody does the stuff to fix it… and if you find some group that does its going to cost you an arm and a leg…
I also personally only see Art students having Macs… with super-huge and super-thick, white screens… I like my Noc, slim-line, wide screen 19″ better…