I have a friends custom built PC. It won't post. There is nothing that shows up on the screen. I have resorted to my usual method of detection by using the process of elimination. I have a list of what i have done to troubleshoot the problem. 1. tested PSU with tester, everything looked fine. 2. removed everything except the CPU and RAM. 3. removed the RAM 4. swapped each RAM in their slots (infineon pc2100 sticks) 5. Used each one seperately. I can't tell who the motherboard manufacturer is. The board is blue though. I have scoured all the parts of the board with no avail. There is a RED lit LED next to the RAM slots. I'm not sure if it is supposed to be green, but it stays lit. The fans spin up and power us being distributed. One strange thing i noticed. Even when the PSU is not plugged into the board i can't get either of the two optical drives to open. The board has onboard video, which could be the problem. No beeps can be heard, there is a speaker connected to the board. What do you guys think?

Did you disconnect all the drives when doing the testing? If the PSU has a 115/230 switch make sure it's in the correct position--115 in the civilized world. You may want to remove the motherboard and test it on a table. I recently had a P-4 like that. When I pulled off the cpu heatsink and fan the cpu came off too, even though the zif lever was down. Turns out they just set the cpu on the socket without bothering to put it IN the socket. Once I straightened out the pins it worked fine.

have you tried resetting the cmos to the default settings (usually using jumper near the silver coin battery). you could also try with a graphics card , a simple PCI one would be best, like an old 1 or 2mb Trio card for example. A lot of people have one of these laying around, very handy to keep for trouble shooting and not worth any money at all.

As for the PSU, i tested it with drives and without drives attached. The PSU is set to the correct voltage setting. I have not removed the CPU from the mobo yet, but i will see what i can do. I plan on trying to use a different vid card to see what may be the issue. I went out today before work to get a spare card, something old. I think i will try to reset the CMOS and see if that get's me anywhere. I will update later today when i get home. Thanks!

Ok, i have sorted things out. The mobo and processor are fried. I swapped out chips and mobo's to test each and still no boot. I had a spare mobo and chip that wouold fit, so it worked out for testing purposes. New question... I have some programs on the old drive that i not only need the data to but the actual apps themselves. Would i be able to install the drive as a slave in a new computer and use the apps? Second question. If i just replaced the mobo and cpu with new one's would i just install and boot up? Thank s for everyone's help.

You probably couldn't run the apps if the drive was connected as slave. Connecting the drive as master on a new system may or may not work. With XP I doubt it will boot. With earlier OS's it should boot but will need drivers for all the new hardware it finds.

While i understand i think i would have a better chance with XP than with a win98 machine? The only PCI card that was in the old machine was a dialup modem that i didn't use. The video was onboard and so was the LAN. I'll swap my optical drives, so there would be minimal change to the setup. So to be specific the only changes on the new computer would be a new mobo and CPU with a new vid card. what do you think?