So I get up this morning, go to my computer, and the thing is bluescreened. I hard reset, and get whirly noises but nothing on the monitor. The 5 year old Gigabyte GA-7N400 motherboard emits a non stop series of long beeps which my manual indicates as being DRAM error. I removed each of my 3 DIMMs and put them back in one by one - same thing. I took a DIMM from the computer at work(which was working fine) and put it in this one - same thing. All these DIMMs were working fine until last night.
Am I correct to conclude that my motherboard is toast? Is there another diagnostic step that I am missing?
I really don’t want to replace it, because it’s so old that I will likely have to replace the graphics card (currently AGP), ram and processor too, which means that I have to educate myself again on the state of the art in motherboards, chipsets, CPUs, RAM, graphics cards…uuuggh.
5 years old? Might be as simple as a battery failure. They tend to last 5 years. You can confirm that the memory is okay by putting it in a known working system.
Alternatively, is it possible you had a power spike last night?
Computers are a fussy lot and you just never know. A few days ago one of my computer started shutting down before even booting. I suspected the power supply so I took it out and tested it but it seemed to be OK. Then I put it in and thing started getting worse. With another PSU nothing worked. I started suspecting a short on the motherboard. I ended up pulling every board and memory module and re-seating everything. After a couple of hours and much frustration the source of the problem became apparent: the start/power button was malfunctioning. Once replaced everything was fine. But I have no idea why with the button disconnected for a while nothing was working, no video, nothing. Sometimes it just seems the computer just wants to get your attention for a while. You disassemble everything, then put it back together the same way it was and everything works fine.
I suppose it’s possible, but I would consider it too likely. When the battery goes, the computer should still be able to boot. You’ll just lose your CMOS settings every time you shut down.
That’s not going to help since the system isn’t booting up at all.
Anyway, getting back to the original post, I’d say it’s a pretty good bet that something hardware-related is kaput, and the motherboard’s a likely culprit. Unless you’ve got more spare parts you can try swapping in (on the unlikely chance that it’s the video card or the semi-likely chance that it’s the CPU), it’s probably worth it to just call it dead and look for a replacement. On a five year old machine, I would think any comparable replacement should be fairly cheap by now.
There has been a rash of MB/PSU problems posted here lately. Maybe the board is overloading our poor little 'puters and sending them to an early grave.
(And I’ve lost a memory stick and a graphics card lately.)
