Hi, I recently got a used computer and hooked it up to a keyboard, mouse and monitor. When I turned the computer on, it made a beeping sound and the monitor would not respond in anyway. Then I tried it in a different monitor, but when i turned it on it made the same beeping sound and the monitor still wouldnt respond. Any idea whats wrong?

Look at the back of the tower carefully to see if there are other places that will accept the cable from the monitor. You may have more than one and are using the wrong one. The beep is a good sign. You did plug in and switch on the power on the monitors? Monitors usually have an indicator light on them to show there is power.

Usually when you get no video, there's nothing wrong with the monitor or the video adapter - something else is wrong. You can check the monitor by hooking it up to a working computer. Describe the beep pattern. One short beep is normal, but other patterns of beeps are not. If you are getting just one short beep, that probably indicates the mboard is booting okay. In that case, if the hard drive is connected properly and has an operating system on it and that operating system is loading, you should see that hard drive activity led is blinking while loading the operating system. ..... "Look at the back of the tower carefully to see if there are other places that will accept the cable from the monitor. You may have more than one and are using the wrong one." If there is a video port in the I/O area where most of the ports are, that's for video built into the mboard. If there is also one (or two) video ports on a card in a slot space, in many cases, the onboard video is disabled when you install a video card in a slot - in that situation plugging a monitor into the video port in the I/O area will not yield you any video.

there is only one beep, and its plugged into the right slot. one thing i forgot to mention tho, was that its "brain was recently wiped clean." im not sure whether that means that the drives were formatted or if the entire operating system was removed :/

You should still see some text when you first start the computer.

"....its plugged into the right slot." A monitor plugs into a port, not a slot. Do you have just the one video port? "....its "brain was recently wiped clean." " I have no idea what you mean when you say that. The hard drive doesn't need to have any data on it at all in order for you to get video while booting. The support for video while booting is built into the mboard's bios. "You should still see some text when you first start the computer." In fact, you should get video, at least text, even if no drives are installed or they are not hooked up. If the computer has a video card in a slot and that's what the monitor is plugged into, if the video card is not all the way down in it's slot you may get no video, yet the mboard may beep normally. In that case, unplug the case/power supply, or otherwise switch off AC power to the case, make sure the video card is all the way down in it's slot - you may need to unfasten it's screw, remove the card, and install it again, fasten the screw - then restore the AC power and try booting again. If someone has flashed the mboard's bios with the wrong bios version, or something went wrong during the flashing, or if someone moved a jumper on the mboard to clear the bios's cmos and didn't move it back to it's"normal" position, you may get no video, but in that case you probably wouldn't get the single short beep from the mboard. Extremely rarely - I have only seen this with one mboard - if you have the monitor plugged into the onboard video port, there is no video card in a slot, and that onboard video adapter is damaged, you may get no video despite you getting the one normal mboard beep - in that case if you installed a video card in a slot and connecting the monitor to that MAY get you video. ........ Some mboards have the bad capacitor problem. That can produce all sorts of symptoms. Open up your case and examine the mboard to see if you have bad capacitors, and/or other findable signs of mboard damage . This was the original bad capacitor problem - has some example pictures. History of why the exploding capacitors and which mboard makers were affected: http://members.datafast.net.au/~dft... What to look for, mboard symptoms, example pictures: http://www.badcaps.net/pages.php?vid=5 Home page that site - what the problem is caused by - he says there are STILL bad capacitors on more recent mboards. http://www.badcaps.net/ Pictures of blown capacitors, other components, power supplies, Athlon cpu's, etc.: http://www.halfdone.com/Personal/Jo...