No beep when posting and blank screen.

P4 1.5, Asus P4T-m mother board. Computer was working fine. Removed CPU, ram and video card to disable computer so my son could not use it. My son took the computer without my knowledge and probably plugged it in and tried to use it without the above components. I got the computer back, installed the components and now it does not post, no beeps and a blank moniter. Lights, fans, hard drives all seem to have power. My question is would powering up the computer without the above components damage the mother board? The only odd ball thing I have seen while trying to cure this problem is the cooling fan on the video card (less than a year old ATI 9600) starts and stops, does not run all the time. I have installed another known good video card and no difference, but the cooling fan did work on the test card. Any and all help with this problem would be much appreciated. Thanking you in advance.

 

Running the system without the CPU, ram and video card should kill the motherboard. However, by the sound of it, it could result in infanticide.

Try unplugging/removing everything (hdd, fdd, CD-ROM) but the power CPU, RAM and video card and see what you get. You should get post screens.

 

I think you left a 'not' out of there. But I loaned a mainboard to someone knowledgeable once and got it back dead. So simply the process of messing with a mainboard can kill it. I can only guess that the problem had to do with electrostatic discharge but who knows.

Try reseating everything after maybe blowing the dust out with compressed air and check all power connections.

Next time, I'd recommend something more devious and much simpler - simply disconnect the power-on buttons wire connectors from the mainboard - unless your son is very "devious" himself.

 

My son is trouble with a capitol "T ". Infanticide was considered many times, but he is my son and is a very kind person, just very inquisitive. I have reseated every component, blown dust from everything. I removed the ram and started it to see if I got any post beeps, but nothing. I will try removing all components but power, cpu and video card and see what happens. Thanks for your suggestions.

 

Unplugged, disabled everything but power, cpu, video card and no change. No post beep and a blank screen. I also tried clearing the cmos by removing battery, unplugging power to mother board and moving jumper for a minute or so. Still no go.

 

Nasty. I think Chiles4 is right on both counts. Yes, I did mean to have a "not" in that sentence, and plugging and unplugging components can kill them.

However, my reason for saying Nasty is that the question is - which component is the dead/problem one. I've been in a similar position a number of times and have found that you end up blowing more new components plugging them in with "the" fault one. If you have old spare parts that isn't too bad. But say its the CPU that is faulty, you may well blow a new board with it and that can get expensive.

Bearing this in mind I'd suggest replacing Motherboard, CPU and RAM as a unit. I'd even be tempted to include video too. If your location is Totenham UK, I'd recommend looking at www.novatech.co.uk. They do very competitive motherboard bunbles. If you don't use them, it will at least give you an idea of the bundles that are available.

 

Thanks for your reply Reggie. I lived in Tottenham Ontario, moved to Guelph Ontario 6 weeks ago. I have forgotten to update my profile. I understand where your coming from with your suggestion on replacing all major components. I do have a lot of spare used components and have played the process of elimination game and yes your right, maybe I have destroyed more components because of a bad CPU, motherboard etc. The strange thing about this deal is despite the lack of a bios beep and no video, the computer sounds like its booting to the operating system. Does that sound logical? The only clue I had to a video problem was that the video card cooling fan, which is powered on the card and not the motherboard, was working intermittently and now is not working at all. I put the video card in another machine and it works fine. I then thought that maybe the AGP slot was defective, so I put a PCI card in to test, but that didn't work either, so I'm right back to square one. Replacing all the major components would be the easy way out, but I'm stubborn and would like to find out exactly what happened to cause this problem. So if anybody has any more suggestions, bring it on. Thanks again.