Pixelkitten

Hello Armageddon, let me see if I got this right: Your friends CPU fan died, but the PC booted up anyway for a while, and now it wont? I would guess that the broken fan has overheated the CPU and damaged it. Booting a PC with a malfunctioning CPU fan can be fatal to your computer, though it's gotten a lot better than it used to be. Disabling the CPU warning might have made your problem worse. My advice is to try to find out whether the CPU is broken or not, and if it is, replace it. If the CPU is working correctly, start going through the usual "boot-failure-troubleshooting-list". Good luck! Pixelkitten

I decided to give it one last chance, so I removed everything except the power to the MB and the power button. Push the power button and Voilà, POST starts beeping as crazy. Plugged in some RAM and tried again, even more beeps! Plugged in the graphics card and hooked it up to a monitor, everything works! I don't know how or why, but it seems to work again! I think I should pray to St. Isidore of Seville and thank him for the miracle or something like that, this was pretty unexpected. Right now it's running the Windows XP installation program, and everything seems to be working as it should! Again, thanks for all your help! Moderators, please close this thread.

Thanks Ken, at least it's cheaper than a new computer. I'll talk it over with my dad.

Yes, it's an electrolytic capacitor, and as I just said the value isn't written on the side! No capacitance, no voltage, only a temperature and some gobbledygook. The motherboard is a Asrock 939Dual-SATA2 rev 1.04.

Ken, MBs from 2005 aren't exactly easy to find. My dad agreed with you that I should replace the cap, but when I unscrewed the MB and checked it, I saw it hasn't got any really legible markings. The only thing printed on it is: "(M) 105°C 5 (2) 8S". So all I know is that it has a working temperature of 105°C, just as most consumer capacitors and that it might have a 20% variance in something (That what's the M is for apparently). The HDDs aren't a problem. The 500GB one is only a year old, and I was planning on reformatting it and start fresh. The old 40GB one only contains documents, which I will transfer to the new one.

According to Wikipedia this is pretty common for the entire last decade. It's the first time it's happened to me, but I expected it to do so sooner or later. Or just that I screwed up when I installed the speaker, or that the speaker was broken. Until I can be sure of the speakers polarity and if it works, that might be the reason why I'm not getting a beep from POST. That still leaves us with the non-existent graphics however.

Update I borrowed a small mirror from my sister and checked that capacitor. It's still difficult to see, but there is definitely some kind of gunk on top of it, it looks like it's leaked out of the capacitor. I started thinking about what else could be wrong other than the cap, and remembered that I don't get any beeps from POST either. It's as if the light is on but nobody's home. I reassembled the old computer, it seems to work no worse than before, which isn't saying much. It'll have to do until I find something attractive on the second hand market, or manage to nag my dad into buying new stuff. Thanks for your help guys, we gave it a try at least!

Hello and welcome to FPCH Saltyer! I assume that your TV has a DE-15 connector and that you have a cable connecting it to your laptop. Is the connector on the laptop activated? You should be able to find it somewhere in your graphics settings. I apologize for not being clearer, but I don't have an XP installation on hand at the moment and my memory is horrible. Is your TV set to the right channel? Some TVs can be very picky about stuff like that. Hopefully it is named something like "VGA-Side" or similar. Good luck, and I hope that you tell us all about any progress you make!

That's because I don't really have a workbench, just a table in my room that I use for whatever I need to do. I have a desk too, but it is definitely NOT tidy. The stuff on the right of the picture is the stuff that was left behind from assembling the computer, the soldering iron and related equipment is usually stored in that grey case, which in turn is stored in my closet. It's hard to get things un-tidy when you've only had them lying around for a couple of hours. ;)

I recently decided to upgrade my mom's computer with the stuff that was left over after I upgraded my own this summer. This did not go without problems, but they are ongoingly chronicled in another place on this forum (here for those who might be interested). Long story short, stuff from 2006 sometimes have trouble fitting into a chassis from 2002. I therefore had to acquire a new chassis and a new PSU. The chassis didn't come with a front fan, but that didn't bother me because I knew I had an old 120mm gathering dust in my spare parts drawer. Turns out that that fan had an old type of connector, with the conductor nowadays used for speed control missing. It therefore refused to fit on the motherboard. Solution: Find a "new"-type connector and splice it with the fan cable. Not that difficult, found the right connector on a Pentium 2 cartridge (Was the fan really that old?) that my dad had saved because "It might be useful". For once in a while he was actually right about not throwing stuff away. So I cut off that connector, cut off the old connector, and warmed up my soldering iron. Soldering the thin little cables turned out to be harder than expected, but I managed, and on my dads insistence I crimped on lugs on all the cable ends. Just plug the two cables into a screw terminal, install the fan and plug in, right? No, the resulting cable was about an inch too short. I had to splice the cable again. I cut off the remaining cable on the P2 cartridge (which my dad insisted on keeping, despite not having a working fan anymore) and warmed up the soldering iron again. I soldered and put lugs on one end of the new cable, and soldered the other end to the old cable. I had a bit of a hard time getting the solder to stick to the lugs, but it worked out fine in the end. To insulate the soldered splice, I used heat-shrink tubing, which was a bit hard to get on and I had to resolder one cable because the tin had a jag that snagged on the tube. Then I used the soldering iron to shrink the tubing. The end result can be seen here. Finally, after a day of cursing at various things and soldering itty-bitty cables, I could finally install the fan into the computer. PS: Sorry if I'm unclear, it's a bit late and I'm not used to discussing electronics in English. Had to look up half of the names for technical stuff on Wikipedia.

Hi, Nev! The fan is a Zalman S7000C-Cu (http://www.zalman.com/ENG/product/Product_Read.asp?idx=311) and weighs 750 grams, also known as more than a fan for a dualcore from 2005 should weigh. It's held in place by two screws and a flimsy little bracket, so excuse me if I try the mirror idea first, because it's a major pain to remove and replace. And no, last time I checked my dad wasn't named Ian. ;)

After digging through my drawers I found two 128MB AGP cards (found an old ATI card from -97 to, but I didn't try that one). None of them worked, neither on VGA or DVI. I'm starting to think it's the motherboard that's dead, one of the capacitors looks like it might have leaked, though it's difficult to tell since it's partially hidden behind the CPU fan. I would totally love to buy some all-new hardware for this computer, but my dad's a cheapskate and I don't have the budget for it myself. Time to start trawling the second-hand market I guess.

Ah, no. As you can see on http://www.asrock.com/MB/overview.asp?Model=939Dual-SATA2 my motherboard has no graphics. It does however have both an PCIe and an AGP port, which simplifies things a lot. Tried switching screens today, no effect, as expected. Didn't have time to try with another card, will tomorrow.

No, the Geforce 7800 has two DVI and one S-Video connector. I could change to a card with a VGA connector (I think I have an old AGP something-or-other lying around), but I think I'll still try changing screens first.

Hi Ken! If I understood that correctly, that's exactly what I'll do tomorrow. I'll plug my LCD in, since I know it works with DVI. The old monitor seems to handle VGA, but I'm not so sure that it can handle DVI and I don't know if the computer is even sending any analog signals. Currently I'm using an adapter to bridge the computers DVI connectors and the monitors VGA connector.