Hm. I’ve been without a main PC for a couple of weeks now. I came home from school one day, turned on my PC and… it wouldn’t work. The power LEDs came on as normal, but nothing showed up on either of my monitors. I tried disconnecting everything and only leaving in my CPU, mobo, RAM and video card (all you should need to boot and output the POST tests and stuff) and still nothing happened. I also tried the integrated graphics card on my mobo, and had roughly the same result (the machine wasn’t usable - the only change was that instead of nothing coming up, garbled random graphics came up)
At this point I decided to try another mobo I had lying around (the crappy Gigabye one that came with my PC). I took everything out, and when I was trying to get my CPU out, I found out that the CPU had stuck itself to my heatsink, and that the heatsink was clogged up (I solved this in the end by using brute force and lots and lots of white spirit to dissolve whatever was sticking my CPU to its mobo). I put everything back in and turned it on… nothing. But this time the LED was orange.
I have a P4 3.06Ghz, an ASUS P4P800-VM and a Gigabyte Columbia GA-8SIML, one stick of 512MB DDR RAM, and a 9800XT. At this point, I think there’s basically two options as to what could be borked:
- my CPU
- my RAM
I personally think that my CPU is probably fried, purely because my heatsink was clogged up. But I have no way of testing either, so I can’t be sure, and my parents won’t just buy me some new RAM or a new CPU without me being absolutely sure that it’s the only broken thing. Does anyone have any ideas as to how I can find out what’s broken?
