computer with blank screen help please

[wazza007]

I hope I haven’t gone too far a screwed my computer up forever. Heres the story:

Around 3-4 years ago we bought this computer of a friend. It has a MSI 645 ultra motherboard with a d-bracket, a 1.6 GHZ Pentium 4 processor, two sticks off 256 mb ram and a nvida gforce 4 graphics card. It worked fine until about a year ago it started being a bit weird. A bit later it just started turning off sometimes and would start working again if I jiggled the cable into the hard drive (doubt this actually did anything but it seemed to work). I backed up all our music and photos planning on getting the guy who we bought the pc off to wipe it clean and reinstall windows as it was loaded with Trojans and crap and stuffed up programs that wouldn’t uninstall. I never got round to asking him. Yesterday I bought a game and really wanted to play it when I got home tonight from the city as I live in the country. But when I got home I turned on the computer and it wouldn’t boot windows at all, telling me it couldn’t find hardware and something was wrong.

Curious to see how much ram the computer had as I wasn’t shure and wanted to see if my computer could play Dawn of War, I took one out and saw that they both said 256mb.

Then I decided to format the hardrive and reinstall windows xp myself and did this successfully. This fixed my problem with the pc not booting. When I went into system in control panel my computer told me I only had 256 mb ram when I should have had double that. So I turned the pc off and took out both ram sticks and replaced them to check they were in proplely.

Now my computer will turn on but the screen is blank and the d-brackets LED’s say its trying to check the ram constantly. Oh and for some stupid reason I cleared the CMOS. please help:( :confused: :confused: :confused: :(

[wazza007]

ive probably just touched the chips with my fingers and f**cked them up cause im such a bloody amateur

[Whyzman]

Welcome tohttp://www.pcguide.com/ubb/pcgubb.gif Forums!

ESDs (electro static discharge) needs to be in the 2000 volt range for us to be able to feel it, but only 200 volts can toast a component. :( Hopefully, that's not what happened...

I would suggest trying each stick of RAM independently and see if you can make it through POST.

If you don't have a grounding wrist strap, I would suggest working on a non conductive surface (e.g. cardboard) making sure to discharge onto something metal before going under the hood...

[wazza007]

it beeps when i turn it on and the d-bracket LED's are stuck on "early chipset initialization" i tried both sticks of ram separately but nothing happened. what does happen when the CMOS is cleared?

[Whyzman]

Clearing the CMOS returns the BIOS to its failsafe/default settings. In the default, a BIOS is pretty much designed to make it through POST. As you see in the BIOS/setup there are a number of "tweaks" one can make to customize.

One such example would the the boot order. Let's say you prefer to have the computer attempt to boot from the A: drive and make the necessary boot order changes (saving and exiting), but the default is C:, clearing the CMOS would return return the system to C:

I will need to do some research on the "chipset" situation. Hopefully, someone will come by that will be able to answer directly....