Without any desire to use a bit more creative title, I've landed on the fail safe solution founded by Hawk. Last Thursday I had my machine running happily, and came out the next morning to find a lifeless desk ornament. It's a bit of an aging beast, Q6600 stock clocking, 3GB DDR2-800, 9600GT, however it's served me well. I assumed that the PSU had failed given the lifeless nature of the machine, not even a power light to be seen from outside the case. Borrowed a brand new PSU, it didn't fix it; upon running the existing PSU past a multimeter everything checked out there, no foul. I'm currently pointing fingers at the motherboard or memory? Thinking of purchasing a ASUS P5G41C-M LX, and 8GB of DDR3-1066 as a fix to the problem; thoughts on this solution, or alternative fixes/issues I'm missing? I'm doubting the CPU is the issue, but haven't made the effort to tear apart the other LGA775 rig I could get at. Insight?
If the memory was bad I think you'd at least get a light. Try using just one memory stick at a time and see what happens.
Looks like we're both in the same boat. I know my PSU is bad because it blew up right in front of me. There were sparks, a nice poof of smoke, and the alarm on my mobo went off. The real question now is what did it take with it when it went?
I too would look at the PSU first but don't rule out anything stupid like the switch. Try shorting the 2 pins that connect to the case switch to make sure. If you realllllly want to test the PSU you can do so with a paperclip. Turn it off, bend a paper clip and run it between the hole that connects to the green cable and one of the black earth cables. Turn the PSU back on and it should power up, if it doesn't then it is dead. To be safe make sure your not holding the paperclip when you turn it on . If you can really be bothered cover the paperclip in electrical tape anywhere it can contact something else but if you a real man don't worry about it too much. I have seen systems completely not respond when a hardware component has failed but its more usual that things will at least spin for a millisecond (such as the CPU fan) and then nothing.
If PSU is out of the question then RAM or motherboard it is. As has been said, try testing with one stick of ram before buying some new stuff. RAM is cheap though, and 3GB isn't really enough these days so I guess that's why you might be so quick to go down that path. At least your motherboard supports DDR3, so then if it is the motherboard you can use the RAM in a new system (mobo/CPU) as it's not really worth paying for a new LGA775 mobo as all the good ones are overpriced.
Tried it with each of the DIMM's I had available, still no life. I'm thinking it's the motherboard, since it won't so much as make a beep code when attempts to boot are made. I should have mentioned that the motherboard light was indeed on, and green.
I hope it took all of the dust bunny population with it; past that I've no idea. Certainly hope the damage was limited to the motherboard, as I'd rather not fork over for a processor.
grim isn't joking, make sure it isnt something out there like a bad power switch. i've dealt with 2 systems in the last year that had bad switches.
I've got that motherboard on order; should be arriving sometime this week. Bought 8GB of memory to go along with it. My question is if I should be purchasing DDR3-1066, or could I purchase DDR3-1600. Would the DDR3-1600 slow down to run in the 1066 slot?
Never thought of that but it's totally possible. Heck the cable to the power switch might have come off.
Yes, but I've never bought stock in the whole future proof thing. If you want fast memory now spend more to get lower timings. Either way the speed increase is not really measurable by human standards. Just so you know heat sinks on DDR3 aren't necessary. It's become such a marketing tool most manufactures wont sell memory without them.
All good to know; when it's a matter of $5 or so for a bit more compatible memory I think I might RMA the stuff I have coming; would be nice to have something that will be compatible with future boards when I move on from the LGA775.
Almost back to normal; for some reason the machine is throwing a BSOD when booting. It flicks so fast that the scan rate of the monitor hasn't finished printing the screen before it's gone. I grabbed some video of it, I believe it's 0x000007a See for yourselves: Any thoughts about this? Normally I'd just format the beast and move on since it's new hardware, but there are a few thing's I'd rather not have to go rooting around to get at before I wipe everything down. Deactivating Adobe's Creative Suite is one of them; their CSR folk always seem so accusing when you call to reactivate after something like this. Safemode seems to hang at classpnp.sys; seems the bug is a bit elusive anyone have the magic bullet?
I have to agree that in the instance of this sort of thing happening I'd usually just reformat. It's not very often that you can change motherboards without reformatting. What motherboard did you have before and what chipset did it use?
The previous board was an OEM intel that ran the Intel Bearlake-G33 (ICH9), the new board is ICH7. The new board is the one I mentioned above, ASUS P5G41C-M LX http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131650
The same happened to me when I tried to upgrade to Win 7 64 off an XP 32 disk. I think I just wiped and did the install differently and it worked. Mine also hung in safe mode and had that supper fast warning message.
Mine didn't play well in safe mode either, ultimately I just reformatted and went along my way. Though it was worth it to get some new thermal paste; dropped 8° C from previous idle.