Thread: Computer won't start up - With Video!

Most likely it's bad RAM

Look up the beep codes for your motherboard
(they'll be listed in the motherboard manual)

You've got one 1-second beep, followed by one 4-second beep

Beep codes for common mobo BIOS's are listed here
http://www.computerhope.com/beep.htm

Yep, most likely broken RAM or CPU, judging from those sounds.

Could be a lack of power aswell, or something else that isn't right. Just look up the beep-codes as Ynot suggested.

Hah, that solved the problem faster than I had hoped for.
You guys are correct, it was bad RAM. Somewhere down the line my friend
must have stuck in a card that doesn't fit properly into the slot. The notches
on the bottom don't line up. Truth be told, I had no idea that's what the beeps
were for. I figured they just meant, "I'm broken, fix me" and nothing specific
beyond that.

Thanks for the link too, Ynot, that really cleared things up for me.

Do not take your friend into a foreign country, he'll break the wall-sockets. How people fail to see that plug-A probably doesn't fit into the completely different looking socket-Z never ceases to amaze me.

This is quite funny actually, a couple of weeks back i encountered a beeping problem on my old HP desktop PC, it was continuous short beeps with no breaks and i assumed the system was knackered.

Checked that link Ynot provided and found it could be a power problem. Opened up the PC and checked the connections from the power to the motherboard and found possibly two connections which weren't in properly lol although i could have been wrong, but regardless of that i plugged it in and tried it and its working again!

Thanks for the link Ynot, theres a ton of files i thought i'd lost for good on that computer.

Hah Marvo, he's a very simple person. I don't think it's a forgivable mistake, but
I'll be enlightening him on the source of the problem with his PC.