Andrani

Unfortunately, the guide was no help ): I have no CDs for the computer from my brother-in-law, and as soon as I turn the computer on, the keyboard dies ): And I still can't find the CMOS battery to try the BIOS reset o.o; It's hiding somewhere on that Motherboard, and it's not wanting to be found...

I'm glad I found you guys, too ;) And yes, the SEO certainly worked ^^

Well, I tried cleaning the fan(OMG, so filthy), then restarting, but that didn't help. On the plus, the fan's clean now, at least. But I've had one problem with the CMOS battery... I can't find it. If it's there, it's probably behind the massive graphics card my brother-in-law felt the need to put in or hiding behind the casing for the fans. Either way, I don't see it when I look in there. *edit* http://i171.photobucket.com/albums/u303/discord248/blackscreen.png This is pretty much what I see when I turn the computer on(Yay for MSPaint..), if it helps any.

I tried that, but it doesn't sound like the fan's running. I turn the computer on, and it starts the fan, and it emediately stops and the computer goes silent. The cursor's on the screen, but it's pretty much 'lights on, nobody home'. I can't use the keyboard, either.

So, as I said in my intro post, I have a second-hand PC that I got from my brother-in-law. It's a Dell XPS, not sure which KIND besides a few years old(My oldest nephew, who just turned 4, was I think 1 or 2 when he got the computer). It runs on Windows Vista(Which I'm not fond of, but I can't reformat down to XP as I haven't got something to back my stuff up onto yet... Which I wish I'd gotten a while ago), and has a 698 GB hard drive, as my brother-in-law is a very serious gamer that plays a lot of first-person MMOs. I haven't used even 1/4 of that yet myself. When he gave me the computer, he did a complete reformat down to the stuff that came with it by default(But I don't think he gave me the CDs, I don't recall him doing that), and I then transfered files from my prior computer to the new one, as I wasn't about to lose a lot of them. This was back in I'd say somewhere between October and early December of last year, and for the past nearly year I've had pretty much no problems besides the monitor going into sleep mode after a few minutes of idleness, but that's something that's been liveable with. So that's the background of the computer during my owning it, I have no idea what problems my brother-in-law had. About... July/August, I stopped leaving my computer on overnight, as I wanted to preserve the monitor's use until I could get a new one(And since then I think I've found what that problem was... Something with Vista?). In mid-August, I was shutting the computer down one night(I'd say the 24th?), when it for some reason rebooted itself and gave me an error. The message was there and gone so fast I was unable to read it. A couple days prior, we had a power surge due to either heat or our power meter going bad(As it did, indeed, go bad - It was probably a couple days to even hours of serious use from either failing epically or catching fire) which caused the computers to shut down, and mine tried to boot back up almost emediately. It made the most god-aweful screaming sound, comparable to having a window seat next to a wing engine on an airplane at take-off, but not nearly as high-pitched. I had to unplug the computer to get it to shut off. It booted up fine after that, but still scared the living daylights out of me. While nothing happened to my mother's computer, as it was shut down by the same power surge, a few days later(August 29), I had come home from work and went to turn it on(As I turned it off while at work, too, so it was only on when I was home and awake), and it booted up fine. I had only been on a few minutes, though, when it suddenly rebooted, stopping at the Windows loading screen. When it wouldn't go any further, I(More than likely very stupidly, as I'm no computer techie...) did a hard shut-down, then rebooted. It didn't make it past the cursor screen, where everything was black and there's just a little blinking underscore cursor. Another reboot, and it gave me this message... "Boot failed at checkpoint [ithr], please..." It tells me to contact Dell, but by now the computer's warranty has long expired. I was lucky to get a couple CDs for my pawnshop laptop, but I fear I may not be so lucky with this computer. I've asked my brother-in-law, who suggested Windows may have crashed, but I'm not thinking that's the problem. I hit google with the error line, and the only things I've found are for posts and things from a couple years ago D: Help? TT; ((Also, I'm not actually sure if this is in the right place? o.o;; If it is, please forgive me TT; ))

I've never been too grand at titles... And this is the first time I've done an intro in... Forever o.o;; Okay... Where to start... Well, username says that much... People on other forums tend to shorten it to Drani, though... I found the forum on google when searching for a solution to a computer issue I'm having(Won't post about that here, though :) ). Said computer I got second-hand from my brother-in-law, no idea where he got it from. Right now I'm on my mother's PC, which I'm not fond of as... It's not my computer XD; I have a laptop, in the shop right now(Unrelated issues, mostly I managed to bork reformatting just enough to not be able to change the resolution... Then the vid card died), got that from a pawn shop... Yeah, I'm semi-cheap, but only because I have to be ^^;; And one day, I intend to get a brand new, not owned by someone else laptop or computer... Not sure which yet. Anything else I need to cover? o.o;