Is there a way to tel if either your mother board or processor has gone bad. when ever i unplug my dvd/cd roms everyting trys and boots up but my video card doesnt wrk. Once i plug in my montor and plug in the ribboins running fomr the mother board to the dvd.cdroms and harddrive nothing happens. all the fans and lights come on but i get nothing. any ideas?

A basic boot to dos prompt from a boot diskette will tell you if the computer is working.Disconnect all hardware but keyboard,monitor and diskette drive.Set bios to boot from A diskette drive first.

Are you making connections while the computer is plugged in? Your question is too generic to give a meaningful answer. Give some specs on the system as you were supposed to do in the original post. If I had to guess based on what we have I would say neither. Power supply is usually where to look first. That is unless there is a story to accompany the issue.