12th October 2010, 8:41 PM
Dark Jaguar Wrote:The big 3 for something like that is: motherboard, power supply, and CPU. Modern computers will at least give an error beep if the RAM is no good. If you can double check those things, then that should solve the issue. I guess I should ask how far the startup process normally goes when it fails to startup. Does it fail to power up entirely?
I already said. It doesn't even start, as far as I can tell. The computer powers on, but the monitor never enables when this problem hits, so I never even see the BIOS/motherboard boot screen, much less anything beyond that. The monitor just sits there blinking in "I'm not receiving any picture" mode, like when the computer is in sleep mode or something.
If it gets far enough for the monitor to engage and go to a solid green light instead of blinking (or yellow, for the other monitor I've got here, same thing), it's going to be fine, usually.
There were some times a few weeks ago when, as I said, it'd reset when I plugged things into or out of the sound card, etc, so it's not 100% when it actually starts... but if it starts and I don't touch anything it seems to work.
But yeah, I really want to figure out why this is happening.
Great Rumbler Wrote:It's nice to have if you've got the extra money, but you can play games and use your computer just fine without one.
While my motherboard has some audio jacks so I assume it's got some kind of onboard audio, they don't work and never have, so even if I did want to give up on having high quality audio, EAX/ALchemy, sound that doesn't use CPU resources, and more -- and I definitely do not -- as far as I know those ports don't do anything anyway. I don't know if they'd suddenly start working if I removed the sound card, but as I don't want to do that, I don't really care to find out.
Sound cards may be slightly less important than graphics cards are, but both are still very useful, important things to have for PC gamers...
Weltall Wrote:I knew precisely what he was talking about. I was joking about deaf people not needing . . .
You know what? Fuck it. I'm not explaining this joke a second time. :FuckYou:
I got your joke, not bad... GR is just trying to be difficult and justify why he doesn't have a sound card, I think. :)
etoven Wrote:Disconnect all drives and remove all PCI cards. Next remove the RAM from the computer. Install one stick of RAM and power on the computer. If that works, install another stick and so on. If all the ram sticks check out, next start adding expansion cards to the system one at a time testing a power on. Finally add the drives back one at a time until the problem is reproduced. Soon you will discover your culprit.
The only cards are the video card and the sound card. Considering that without having video plugged in I can't tell whether the computer is working or not (looking at the box it seems to be powered on either way, after all), unplugging that seems like it'd be thoroughly counter-productive... it's not like there's any other way of getting video output.
As for the sound card, I did try it without that a few weeks ago, and yes it did work that time while it'd been having a lot of problems otherwise, so I do wonder if it's bad. I'm not sure how to test it though, because of how sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. As I've been saying it makes me wonder if something's touching where it shouldn't be or something, if it's not just the sound card (why would touching the back reset the computer? That is not right!), but I don't know how to test for that myself.