I am wondering if anyone has an idea what is wrong with my computer. It's a PC100 motherboard, 800 mhz, with more than 400mb of rams in it. Syntoms: when power switch is press, power supply fan is on, cpu fan is on, zip drive light would flash, no BEEP, and nothing else comes on, no power to harddive, cd-rom, cd-rw, monitor... Things done to find the problem and result: 1. unplug everything (all ide drives, memory, pci cards, cpu, power supply) and replugged; nothing changes. 2. test with a brand new power supply; nothing changes. 3. reset cmos, test with new battery; nothing changes. 4. unplug the un-essentials (cd rom, zip drive, memory), and test; nothing changes. 5. here's the fun part! unplug all the ide cables leaving only the power plug-in to the dives. Vola! all the drives has power! I can even play music cd in the cd-rom. but as soon is i plug in the ide cables, all the drives are dead again. I haven't get my hands on new IDE cables to test to see if the cables are the problem. But I doubt that all the cables could become defective at the same time. I am hoping someone could give an idea what else might be wrong with the computer. Oh, I recently made a lot of upgrades to my machine. Within the last month, I have: * upgrade OS from 98se to XP; * change my old HP cdrw to an unknow brand (faster) cdrw; * added a 516mb ram to the original 196mb, although only 416mb shows up at memory test; No matter what I do, I just can't get that BEEP at startup. Anyone know why?

Try each stick of memory on it's own in Dimm 0.

You might have had one of your drives connected backwards. Try connection one drive at a time.