Dear readers, Yesterday I started playing around with the old computer my younger brother had laying around in his room. He did not mention it wasn't functioning as he hadn't touched it for the last 3 months. First thing I could think of was the CMOS battery that just lost it's charge, so I went out and bought a new battery. No succes. Beforehand I should probably mention that this computer is from around 2006, but I'd like to recover or fix it so that my grandpa can have it, who's using a pc from 1998. I know many of you, including myself, would tell him to just buy a new one but he's perfectly fine with this one and just doesn't want a new one. The problem is that it does 'boot', e.g. the lights start flashing on the pc, lights on keyboard start flashing, fans turn on...then pretty much immediately shuts down again. Sometimes it boots a little further, for like 3 seconds then shuts down. The weird thing to me is that it automatically tries to start up again but that's not much of a problem I suppose. One out of 40 times or so it does stay on untill I manually power it off. I do not get any beeps either. Once I moved the jumper for the first time it did, changing from 1 beep to 3 beeps sometimes which made no sense to me either. As of now, what I've done is: move jumper pin, removed extra graphics card, tried booting with 1 RAM stick, tried another monitor. Still no luck. What I'm trying to accomplish here is just getting a signal on my monitor to see what the hell is happening, but it just keeps giving me 'no signal'...even when the computer stays on (untill I manually turn it off).
Does this computer have onboard video or a card or both? This can be a number of things, from ram to hard drive to psu to video card..If this computer has been sitting, then you might just want to like start from scratch...pull it all apart and clean it, then put it back together...Testing each part as you go.
Ghostman's advice is spot on. If it's an old piece of kit you need to strip it down, clean it, give it a good look over, then build it back up piece by piece, testing as you go
