Your PC suddenly does not POST What do you Suspect?

[valtea]

If the fan starts and there is no beep. considering that the speaker/buzzer is working.

I think most of the time it will be Motherboard or Processor. But is there anyway to know which is faulty. For home users it is very diffcult to know what is faulty as we do not have extra processor or motherboard to test. Taking it to a service center for testing again cost some money.
I have seen something like PCI Card (used to diagnose problems) which is attached and it displays some Hexadecimals (i beleive) Numbers which i think are memory locations. Does anyone know of this? where can i get one ? what is it called?

 

[bharathbala2003]

I think most of the time it will be Motherboard or Processor. But is there anyway to know which is faulty

i think its not that way.. its mainly cos of SMPS.. the post is performed to check if different components get the correct power supply.. so if the SMPS is not workin the post will fail

 

[technovice]

in my case its mostly been the motherboard thats been the culprit
on numerous times ive had to replace the cmos battery...and when that did not work...i'd finally turn to my engineer

 

[Sankalp]

Well i usually reset the memory. If that dosent work check the ram then go for other methods

 

[godsownman]

I think the motherboard anyway u chk it out and let us know .
Regarding the PCI card I dont know about it .

 

[Kannan]

Surely Motherboard.

Cause, these days motherboard uses soft power controls. So if SMPS is in problem and it doesn't send a power good signal then motherboard will not switch on.

If there is a problem in Processor or RAM, then MB will show some kind of error or beeps.

 

[valtea]

So the Solutions goes down to SMPS or Motherboard

 

[Kannan]

Motherboard @ valtea !!

 

[pimpom]

The motherboard would be the first suspect, but I've come across cases where the same symptoms were caused by different things. A defective CPU, PSU (SMPS) or a weak CMOS battery can definitely cause such symptoms.

In a few cases, one of the 20 pins of the ATX PSU connector did not make proper contact with the mobo. In the case of two newly assembled computers, one of the female points on the PSU's ATX connector had not been locked properly in the plastic housing, so that it did not make contact with the pin on the mobo.

In some other cases, one of the pins had been badly burnt, causing random crashes and ultimately POST failure. Some of those pins carry a heavy amperage, and a less than perfect contact can cause a lot misery to the user and to someone trying to diagnose the problem.

In yet another case, the owner had removed and reinstalled the CPU to test another CPU, and in the process he nicked one of the tiny copper tracks on the mobo. The break was almost invisible even with a magnifying glass.

That caused me a lot of headache because the original Duron 600 worked on another mobo, and the mobo worked with a Duron 1.1GHz and an Athlon XP !!! (I didn't have a spare Duron 600 for testing). Once the problem was isolated, it was a simple matter to bridge the break in the copper track with a tiny blob of solder.

 

[klinux]

Which M/B are u using ??? r u able to run the system ? my a7v8x-mx , does not beep , hasnt done this from the first day , but the system runs fine and speakers work . But still i can get error beeps correctly , if i remove the ram or install a faulty video card .

 

[valtea]

strange... it doesnt even beep at POST???