Help! I am leaving for college tomorrow morning and just last night, my CPU heatsink/fan more or less died. I didn't realize it at first--at one point, I was using my computer normally and then the monitor went dead. I restarted and it was fine, but about ten minutes later the monitor went dead again. I figured it was my monitor and turned it all off, but also checked the fan. I noticed that the room was very hot. So, this morning I bought a new CPU fan, put it in, and the fan works great. Only problem is, I can't get my computer to boot up all the way. There are beeps, and it starts to go through the typical boot screens, but it only makes it for about 10-20 seconds and then the monitor shuts off and the light blinks. Same with the optical mouse, and the CD drive light--all flashing. Is it the processor? Is something dead that I need to replace? I don't have anything I can interchange in there, it's the only decent computer I own. HELP!!! I'm desperate!

Also, I tried two different monitors and they both did the same thing, so I know that's not the problem. It's definitely something inside the computer.

It sounds like your PC is halting for some reason, try checking through all of the bios options and make sure that it's all ok. Then if still nothing try setting it to halt on no errors. If still no change then it could be that some of your components are damaged.

Yikes! That's a situation. Unfortunately, that's going to be sort of hard to diagnose, however the beeps are a dead give away that something is either up with the motherboard or CPU. Your Video is fine because your seeing boot screens. I bet your processor overheated. What's worse, the damage might already be done so a new fan won't do much for an an already burned out processor. If only I knew the sequence or pattern of the BIOS beep code, I could then tell you the exact problem. Oh Yeah, I might also need your computer's make and model to correctly identify your BIOS. Different BIOS manufacturers have different beep codes. I sure do wish you the best of luck.

I had a similar thing happen to me with an Athlon 2100+ Chip. The fan was dying, and i was constantly running it at very high temperatures until it finally refused to turn on. After I replaced the fan, it worked, but would only last 10-30 seconds before shutting off. It gave me the message, "Processor is out of sync." Finally, I solved it by editing the bios and lowering the clock speed from 1800Mhz to 1300Mhz. I didn't have any problems after that.