Friend has an HP Media Center PC m7250n. It's about 2.5 years old and when opened, it was fairly dusty inside. She said she turned it on one day and it "beeped a lot". She took a shower hoping for it to go away and returned to find it working fine. The problem has returned. The monitor doesn't show a thing. Black as night. But works, tested on another computer. The beeping is rapid and repeating single second beeps. I've known this to be a bad GFX card, but googling and hp.com showed it to be possibly bad PSU, Mobo, or GFX card. First step was to blow the dust out. Did not fix the problem. Second step was to remove each Pci/Agp card one by one, testing as we went, starting with the graphics card. With all PCI/AGP cards removed, all plugs except the power cord removed from the back, and the CD-ROM drives unplugged, the computer still retains the single second repeating beep code. The fans on the power supply are all spinning. My diagnoses is likely to be a bad mobo. Anyone care to support or disagree? Could it be a dead CPU? Thanks.

Repeating (Endless loop) Memory error Bad memory or bad connection. Try reseating the memory. if it still continues take out one stick if she has more then one and restart it. if it still beeps take out the other one and put the other ram that you first took out and place it back in and restart it. If non of the above work try moving the ram to diff slots. Narrowing it down to if it's bad ram, bad slot or the ram just needs to be reseatted.

As Cobra_R has pointed out, a beep pattern that never ends is often a ram problem. E.g. if you have an Award bios, or a brand name system bios based on an Award bios, that's often a beep lasting about a half second, silence for a half second, a beep for about a half second, silence for a half second, continously. If she did not change which ram she had installed before she had the problem, her ram has probably developed poor connections in it's slot(s) over time. See response 2 in this - try making sure the modules are properly seated as Cobra_R suggested, and I would add try cleaning the contacts on the ram modules: http://www.computing.net/hardware/w... Contrary to popular belief, bad ram is extremely rare, except when the ram has been damaged by something the user did when installing or removing it, or by something damaging the computer such as a power supply failing or exposure to a power spike or surge. Bad ram slots are even rarer. This poor connection problem is common, and usually happens after the ram has been in the slots a long time, but I've had a few new modules that needed to have their contacts cleaned. Reseating the ram and/or cleaning the ram contacts has worked every time for me for many mboards - I have never come across a ram module that is actually bad. If the ram is tested with a program or utility, that should be done AFTER trying re-seating the modules, and preferably also after cleaning the contacts on the modules, otherwise any memory errors found will probably be invalid. If different ram from what worked fine before is tried, it must be compatible with the mboard, particularly it's main chipset. Not all ram that you might think should work will work. See response 5 in this for some info about ram compatibilty, and some places where you can find out what will work in your mboard for sure: http://www.computing.net/hardware/w... Correction to that: Mushkin www.mushkin.com