Computer rebooted, then stopped on bios screen

My puter running xp home all of a sudden rebooted itself , then when it got to the bios screen , stopped before the mem count. I have tried taking out and swapping the mem chips , but don;t have any new one to replace . Kinda thought the ram went bad . Just trying to narrow things down a bit before spending money . anyone got any ideas or suggestions ? I don't get any error messages . I also didn't really have any problems untill now . I try to keep a tight , clean computer. All updates and upgrades have been regular. The compac puter itself is about 2 years old and runs on an ASUS mb with a 2.4 gig amd pc. Nothing special.

 

What do you see on the screen? The first screen with the graphics information, the second screen when the memory is counted, the Compaq splash screen or a blank screen? Can you press F10 to get to the BIOS settings?

When the system starts, you should see the LEDS flash (the keyboard and the drives). If an LED is staying on (like the HDD LED) disconnect that piece of equipment.

Are all the fans in the case spinning freely?

Disconnect the power (you can press the power button to deplete any remaining power). Remove the CMOS battery for 30min - 1 hour or more and I suggest you get a replacement battery.

If you can see things on the screen there might be some hope.

Matt

 

Yes, please provide some more detail about exactly what you see when you try to boot up. And any other abnormal symptoms. Beeps?

It does sound like one of your hardware components just up and died - or somehow malfunctioned.

 

Think I got it

Well ---after I got everything apart and dusted off----I reassembled-------It actually booted up ---then rebooted again ----then after that ----It stayed on long enough for me to get an error message . I clicked on details and it sent me to a web page telling me about my graphics accelleration ---being to high , and to slow it down to nothing . Its been set to full accelleration since I got the puter. So whatever did this to me ---well , slowing down the speed of things worked , cause I've now been up and running with no reboots for about 12 hours