Computer help needed...

[Luvian]

I need some help with a computer... Yesterday my brother called me. The day before that he came over, and we played Civilization 4 on a LAN. He went back home and didn't connect his computer.

Yesterday he connected it, but it wouldn't start. It would go up to when windows should load, but the screen would turn black, with with that little underline thing in the upper left corner that represent where you can type, but of course you couldn't type anything.

He rebooted, pressed F8, and tried Safe Mode, same thing. He tried loading the last working settings, it didn't work either. I suspected it might be the screen, as he's not using the same screen when he come over, and the bios detected his hard drive just fine. We tried one of his old screen he was using a month ago before he got his new one, and it didn't work either.

So I went and bought a new hard drive, brought his computer to my home to try repairing it, but before changing anything I connected it to the spare screen/keyboard he use whewn he come over, and this time windows booted.

What could be the problem? I'm guessing the screen, because only that and the keyboard changed, but if it's the screen, why wouldn't it work with the two screens at his home?

[Bungleau]

Could have been a loose connection in the screen, mouse, or keyboard. That could cause that kind of grief.

Unless... does it work when you boot without connecting to your network? There may be something that's doing a network check that's hanging. I know I'm stretching for it, but it's a possibility. A full malware check may be in order.

[Luvian]

Originally posted by Bungleau: Could have been a loose connection in the screen, mouse, or keyboard. That could cause that kind of grief. Unless... does it work when you boot without connecting to your network? There may be something that's doing a network check that's hanging. I know I'm stretching for it, but it's a possibility. A full malware check may be in order.

Well at his house I tried the computer on two workplace, with two different set of keyboard/screen, and the mouse is USB, so it's pretty hard to mess that up.

I could use the keyboard in the bios and all other screens before windows start, like the screen that ask you if you want Safe mode and all that. It could be the network and I considered it, but I tried without it connected and it didn't work.

There's one thing that's suspicious to me. I opened the box to look at all the connections to see if something got disconected. One of the RAM slot seem to have a defect, one of it's thing that secure the RAM bar seem a little lose, and the RAM doesn't get pushed as far inside the slot as what I'm used to either. It end up a little higher than the other RAM bar once inserted. I looked and it's as far as it goes.

I've had faulty RAM before, and as far as I remember, the problem he is getting doesn't look like the problems I was getting back then because of that. Could it still be it?

[ 11-16-2005, 03:56 PM: Message edited by: Luvian ]

[Bungleau]

Hmmm... hard to say. It certainly could be the memory misbehaving, although when I've run into this in the past, it hasn't been hardware related. You could try removing that RAM stick to see if it boots without it (assuming there's still enough memory for it to boot).

Two other tests come to mind that should resolve things:

1. Bring his screens/keyboards to your place and try them out.

2. If they work, bring your screen/keyboard to his place to try them out.

There may be something with just where it's set up... and yeah, I'm really grasping at straws now

[Zebodog]

Once it's booted (assuming that you can again) check the event viewer under Administrative Tools in the Control Panel to see what it was hanging up on. You could also check the bootlog. Once in to Windows, I'd also suggest running Check Disk to fix any file system errors.

It's highly unlikely that a simply monitor change would cause a boot issue. You might want to look at a loose video card as a potential problem and double check all your add in cards while your at it. Moving around PC's has a way of knocking things loose.

The fact that the PC booted past POST leads me to conclude that the keyboard is a non-issue. Generally speaking a PC will not POST without a keyboard.

Some info from MS: http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;314503

[ 11-16-2005, 06:42 PM: Message edited by: Zebodog ]

[bjorn]

ok. this might have nothing to do with anything, and I'm quite drunk.

but...

I had a similar problem a while back. I had installed Close Combat 5 the day before and when i tried to start my computer it would not boot. I tried everything and was ready to format when i for some reason figured out that my computer was trying to boot from my close combat cd, of course it coulden't and it frose.