Knew it was too good to be true-PC won't start

[Dynesh]

Everything's been going good so far on my new PC, but I was downloading something in Vista, walked away to get a bite, came back and PC was off. Tried turning it back on, all it will do is start to boot for about 1/2 a second, then nothing, sometimes it doesn't even do that.

Got it to boot for about a minute once, but then it turned off again before boot was done.

Bad PSU?, Motherboard?

Any thoughts?

[gvblake22]

Try stripping it down to the bare necessities. Disconnect all optical drives, remove all but one stick of RAM in the first DIMM slot, remove any sound cards, NIC's, etc, and disconnect all hard drives except the boot drive (unless you are on a RAID or something). When you turn on the computer, go immediately into the BIOS and select the option to reset everything to Fail Safe Defaults. Save and exit the BIOS, and let it restart and see if it will boot into Windows then we'll go from there.

[Dynesh]

Ok, before I saw your post, I took out the motherboard power cable, and reconnected, and now I've gotten the PC to start up three times, but one time the monitor wasn't getting a signal. Do you think I should do anything, or wait and see?

[gvblake22]

So it is working normally now or not? If you feel like you could answer that question either way, just restart the machine from Windows and if it boots up fine, then I'd say you have your answer

[Dynesh]

Ok, I rebooted again, and got a message about overclocking failed, and something about voltage. The only thing I have messed with is the RAM to try and get it set right. Do you think this would cause this problem. Maybe RAM overheated? Don't know if RAM getting too hot would cause system to shut off or not. It's been running normally for about 5 minutes now.

[gvblake22]

Well, if you've been tweaking the RAM settings, it's very possible there is a wrong setting somewhere in the BIOS that is throwing everything off. Go back to the defaults and see if the problem disappears.

[Dynesh]

Ok, I've done that. Now I guess I'll just see what happens. It ran fine for close to an hour after I did mess with the RAM settings.

[gvblake22]

I've found that changing only one thing at a time and doing at least a bit of moderate stability testing is the best way to go. That way when something goes wrong, you know exactly what it was and you can remedy the situation and can be sure not to make the same mistake twice (if you keep track of the things you've tried that is).