Pc problem?
- Thread starter col
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fossyant
Ride It Like You Stole It!
- Location
- South Manchester
Sorry computer and bike geek 'ere !
ColinJ
Puzzle game procrastinator!
- Location
- Todmorden - Yorks/Lancs border
I don't think you'd get any beeping at all if the CPU wasn't seated properly since not even the BIOS would be able to run (and produce the beeping)!Brock said:
I heard beeping a few times on my old PC when it malfunctioned. The first time I didn't know what it meant so I RTFM and discovered that the beeps indicated that there was a graphics problem. When I opened up the case, sure enough, the graphics card had managed to lift itself ever so slightly up in its card slot. I suppose it is the constant thermal cycling within the PC that eventually causes this kind of problem. Whenever the problem recurred, I just opened up the case and pushed the card back. I also cleaned out any accumulated dust while I was at it.
The PC I'm using now played up last week. There was no sign of life at all when I tried to switch it on. I've had this problem before and suspected the mains lead, so when a replacement lead fixed the problem, I just chucked the old one out without any further ado. When the problem happened this time, I switched leads with my printer and there was still no joy, though the printer still powered up as usual. I opened up the PC again and managed to get it working by wiggling the internal wiring about. I imagine there is a dry soldered joint somewhere in there but I'll leave well alone for now.
*** An important reminder while we are on the subject of dodgy hardware *** - are you all doing your daily computer backups?
Over the years, I watched a succession of work colleagues do the swearing, desk-thumping, and anguished office-pacing thing as it slowly dawned on them that their non-backed-up hard drives had failed. One guy lost a whole year's worth of work!!! What a senior engineer thought he was doing not even having paper copies of his work, I don't know... The company had to shell out several thousand pounds to get the hard drive rebuilt so he could salvage his data.
I used to feel incredibly smug about these problems because I made sure that I backed my work up every day. Then of course I went self-employed and didn't have access to a convenient network drive, so my backup regime got forgotten... Of course, the inevitable happened and I had a terminal hard disk failure last year - everything was lost
!I now do regular data backups onto a couple of USB flashdrives (one being a backup of the other!). I'm also going to get a second hard drive and run something like Norton Ghost to maintain a working copy of my main drive, just in case. Last time it took me more than a week to get everything reinstalled and reconfigured.
fossyant
Ride It Like You Stole It!
- Location
- South Manchester
Col, just different types of drives. IDE have been out years an used a ribbon about 2" wide, then they got faster ATA33,66,100,133. Then new ones came out called SATA - serial ATA, even faster SATA 1 is 150, then SATA2 is 300.
Don't need to know more. Oh and my PC is RAID - 2 hard drives runing together doing the same thing, so if one fails, I pop in a new drive and it rebuilds itself. Had two HD failures (same make) in last three years....and back up stuff to an extra drive....
Don't need to know more. Oh and my PC is RAID - 2 hard drives runing together doing the same thing, so if one fails, I pop in a new drive and it rebuilds itself. Had two HD failures (same make) in last three years....and back up stuff to an extra drive....
ColinJ
Puzzle game procrastinator!
- Location
- Todmorden - Yorks/Lancs border
Nope...Brock said:BIOS runs from the motherboard doesn't it? It can warn of broken CPU I'm sure..
The BIOS is basically just a very simple piece of low-level software embedded in a chip on the motherboard. BIOS stands for Basic Input/Output System. That software is the first thing that the CPU executes when it comes out of its reset condition. If it isn't faulty that is...
This is taken from a good article on How Stuff Works:
What BIOS Does
The BIOS software has a number of different roles, but its most important role is to load the operating system. When you turn on your computer and the microprocessor [CJ: a.k.a. CPU, Pentium, whatever] tries to execute its first instruction, it has to get that instruction from somewhere. It cannot get it from the operating system because the operating system is located on a hard disk, and the microprocessor cannot get to it without some instructions that tell it how. The BIOS provides those instructions.
Here's another one on Wikipedia.
