I recently built a new desktop computer, and I’m running Windows XP Professional on it. It is made up of some new parts and some old parts from my old computer. One of the old parts is the monitor, and it has been messing up ever since I plugged it into the new desktop. The way in which it messes up is that it will only display a line near the top of the screen, and the rest will be black, though it does this intermittently.
Last night, I was on the new desktop and the monitor was acting up again, and I couldn’t get it working correctly again. (I believe it to be a connection problem, because it will start to work again when I disconnect the power from it and plug it back in again.) But since I couldn’t get it working at all, I simply turned off power to the computer because I couldn’t see anything to shut it down properly.
When I tried to power it on again this morning, the monitor will turn on, and it displays this blue box with several different icons, though I have no control over it, whether by mouse or keyboard. My main problem is that the computer will not boot up at all now.
I can tell that there is power going to it, because there is a red light on the motherboard that will light up when I plug it in. But trying to turn it on and make it boot up does nothing. What could the problem be and how do I fix it?
I hope that I have explained the situation sufficiently. If you need to know more about what exactly I’m using in the computer, then let me know. Thanks for your help.
You built it yourself and it’s never started right? It could be anything: bad video card, wrong power supply, overheated CPU (by not properly installing fans), misconfigured hard drives. In fact, what you have is probably caused by more than one problem.
First step is in verifying if you’ve got the proper parts for everything, and then you can go from there. Do you know what your BIOS screen is supposed to look like upon bootup? Have you ever been able to see it? Any beeps?
That is right. One major problem is probably a whole slew of driver problems. Did you simply transplant an existing Windows XP installation on a hard drive to a mismash of new parts? That is an important thing for us to know.
One route to fix it would be to hit F8 as the computer boots to try to get into Safe Mode so that you can see what is going on in the Device Manager.
Yes, the computer has started. Everything was fully loaded. I installed everything, including all the drivers, and I was on the internet. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
The computer will not boot at all. I can tell because there are no sounds coming from the computer, and none of the fans are on. I have noticed that the red light that is on on the motherboard is the standby led.
For further information, I’ve tried swapping power supplies. (The power supply from the old computer is 120W and the power supply from new one is 450W.) But still, nothing happened when I tried to boot it up. I was using the 450W power supply at first, and tried to use the old one for troubleshooting, but it didn’t fix the problem.
Correction, you had one . I’ll bet all the plugging and unplugging and mucking around has killed it, I’m sorry to say, and there’s not much to do but get a new one.
The problem was that I had accidentally kicked the front panel when I was stepping over it, and that disconnected the connection that went from the start switch to the motherboard. So after I turned it off because of the monitor problems, it wouldn’t start up because the connection wasn’t there. I didn’t realize that that was what happened until about half an hour ago. So I reconnected it, and it started up.
As a side note, upon restarting it again, I had some problems because I didn’t connect the power back to the motherboard all the way, so it would start for a second and then die. But I reseated those connections, and everything is working fine now.
That is, except for the monitor, which went out while I was typing this message, but is back on again, for probably three minutes. :rolleyes:
. I’ll bet all the plugging and unplugging and mucking around has killed it, I’m sorry to say, and there’s not much to do but get a new one.