Help : PC not displaying anything

[Dezm0nd]

Sorry about the vague title but last night my gaming rig decided to pack up and go on a break. It shut down instantly without any warning and refuses to display any picture when pressing the power button.

I have noticed that there is something missing from the natural boot up noise the machine makes, the usual two beeps I've been used to are now next to inaudible but the computer fans are spinning fine.

I have unplugged all wires and replugged them and have left the machine unplugged to reset the bios. I have removed power cable and BIOS battery.

Does anyone have any idea what it could be? At first I thought it could be hard drive related but you'd at least get the BIOS screen. All I do get is a blank screen with the monitor on standby refusing to acknowledge any recollection of a PC being turned on.

I have been getting some blue screens over the couple weeks, but I jus assumed it was Vista being cack but it seems I should've paid for attention.

The supplier, for the second time now, keep trying to stall me before sending it back for warranty repairs so i'm hoping to fix it myself.

Any help is useful, thanks.

[abigsmurf]

My first guess would be ram failure but there are lots of potential things it could be. In order of likelyness I'd go RAM > Graphics Card > fried motherboard (possibly due to bad PSU or overheating).

Check the back of your PC, lots of motherboards now have 4 diagnostic lights that go yellow red or green to help you identify problems. If it does, look up the light sequence in the manual for the motherboard.

Otherwise won't be easy to troubleshoot. You could stick a known good ram stick in, instead of the existing one.

[briareos_kerensky]

I'd say video card. Mine failed last month after four years of faithful service, screen went blank when the PC was still on and it continued to function (net activity) until I pressed the reset button.
When turned on the PC would power up, but will not boot. Removed the video card and it would run fine, load Windows and everything (I previously configured the BIOS not to stop at any errors...don't remember why), with the monitor displaying just a blank screen.

[Dezm0nd]

Cheers for the advice, going to leave the battery and PSU unplugged all night and give it a shot tomorrow.

Perfect timing, I buy Dawn Of War II and this happens.

Thanks again.

[Hohum]

Try reseating your graphics card, removing and reconnecting power cables, etc.

I have been getting some blue screens over the couple weeks, but I jus assumed it was Vista being cack but it seems I should've paid for attention.

Blue screens generally always point to either a hardware issue, or a driver issue (although drivers are far less likely to take the O/S down with Vista compared to XP, so it's probably not that).

[MattyD]

Have you tried unplugging your dedicated video card and trying the motherboard's integrated graphics output yet? If that works your graphics card is dead. If it doesn't, try removing all but one stick of your RAM and switch on, then cycle through each stick until you find one that works / doesn't work. If none of this isolates the problem I'd say it's a motherboard or BIOS failure.

[Dezm0nd]

Tried the above words of wisdom and nothing. Thank god I backed up my pictures recently!

Cheers for the help but it's going back to the supplier I guess!