Just say you were surfing the net one day..then pow.. screen goes black.. reboot and still black..but no beeps at boot up to show there is a problem.. nor does it try to access floppy..

tried new video card with no luck.. now this has really got me puzzled.. solve this and i will scream your name to the world that you are the best computer guru in the world..

thx...
Raven

Any lights? Any fans going? If not, a capacitor in the power supply might have blown. Although a shorted floppy can have a similar effect when the motor burns out (try unplugging the floppy power cable.) For a list of steps to check, see the no boot article at www.techtony.com

Any lights? Any fans going? If not, a capacitor in the power supply might have blown. Although a shorted floppy can have a similar effect when the motor burns out (try unplugging the floppy power cable.) For a list of steps to check, see the no boot article at www.techtony.com

Wow.. you are fast.. umm yes there are lights.. green power light, cdrom light, and a yellow light that stays on.. thought it was for suspend mode.. not exactly sure..

When you turn it on, does the hard drive make any noise. (Also what's the floppy drive doing)
If there is no significant hard drive activity it may mainboard.

Raa

After powering on the system do you see anything at all or is it that windows boots but you don't see the desktop since the monitor seems to be on but running in a sort of sleep mode? It may be that your screen refresh was too high and the monitor is trying to display it but can't so it goes black into a sort of sleep mode. If your monitor has a reset button to restore manufacturer defaults then reset it, turn it off and then back on. Try loading into safe mode, go to display properties, advance and change the refresh rate and/or monitor type being uses by windows.

If the computer is on and you press the keyboard CAPS lock on/off do you see that the keyboard is responding? If not replace the keyboard or try a different one you know works.

Can you get to the system bios screen at the initial startup? If not you may need to open your computer, check the CPU. Is the CPU fan working? Is the CPU really hot only after a few minutes? It could be your CPU went bad. Especially if you have been overclocking your cpu for added speed.

If you hard drive has a light that blinks when it is active are you seeing it blink? If not you could have a crossed wire or your motherboard is not grounded.

You may have to reset your motherboard bios. The manual should have the information on what jumper to pull in order to reset your bios and then to put the jumper back.

Try removing some memory and see if one piece of memory works and if the other does not.

Yes, all lights work except floppy.. hd does show activity for a brief moment..nothing appears on screen from power up.. just black..cpu fan is running also

Let me add this... after playing some more i did notice the red led (hdd) flashing and a tic..tic sound coming from mb somewhere.. not to be confused with hdd activity..the hdd seems to work fine as far as activity on it.. the ticking (best i can tell) is in the area of the video card and memory banks

My opinion would be a blown monitor, or a bad or misseated video card. Seems the rest of the computer is working, except for floppy but you may have it set not to seek floppy on boot up.

Do you have another monitor you could try it on?

If not first thing I would do it remove cover and check the video card to see it is seated properly.
Good luck.

Raven,

What are the specs of your system? I've have the same problem on my home network and it only happens to the non-pentium class systems.
All the systems I have use Intel processors and only the 486's that have been upgraded to Win98se have done this. Sometimes it's just a black screen and sometimes the only thing you see on the black screen is the underline blinking cursor that doesn't respond to the keyboard. The only solution that worked for me was to do a Hard Restart and not Ctl-Alt-Del.