Hi everyone, In the last week or so, I have increasingly experienced the following problem: when powering on, the PC fans come on and a light, but it does not boot up: the monitor stays on standby, the keyboard num lock light stays off, and there is no beep, as usual. On the previosu couple of occasions, I have powered off and retried, and after 2/3 goes it works normally. This morning however I tried several times with no success, and am contacting you on my work PC. I'm not sure it is related, butlast night I carfull deleted one or two files and folders on C: that I thought were unused. It turns out that I may have deleted some sound drivers (winamp wouldn't work, and who knows what else. However, my other problem started a few days before this, so don't think it is connected. Please, please help me out today so I can fix it when I get home!!

boot with the xp install disk, all the way to the page that shows the c: drive and its size/etc. do a repair from the page. xp will reload the files you dumped, without losing othere data

I may be wrong, but I don't think the files you deleted are the direct problem... although they may have added their 2 cents worth. I don't know what machine you are running but it's usually the BIOS that kicks the monitor out of stand by. This being the case then the problem would be prior to any windowsXP or hard disk activity. I would start looking at the actual hardware itself first. Start with the simple things... coffee slopped into the keyboard, loose plugs, connectors...and work your way up.

I'd reset the cmos personally. Doubt it would be coffee in keyboard as its not even beeping, and its not getting as far as windows so i doubt its getting upset by missing files.

I agree with door. By the time the BIOS gets round to loading the OS, the monitor should be up and running, otherwise how would you see all that information in b/w that the BIOS displays before the OS boots. During the boot process the display is the first device to be initialised by the BIOS, before anything else, including disk drives and other PCI cards. If the display fails it points to something very early on in the boot process. This indicates either the display adaptor itself or the memory or CPU or possibly a power problem. Does the computer bleep with anything other then one short bleep or does it not bleep at all? Stuart

Hi all, thanks for your thoughts. Stuart, there is no bleep at all. The fans come on, but that's it. I have taken out all external leads and plugged them back in - no dice. I don't really know my way around the insides too well, a friend built my PC but lives a couple of hundred miles away. Cheers, Steve

Your vid card is walking out of the socket. Check by pressing on the side of the card toward the socket. If it moves then remove the card and reinstall it. Check that the keeper screw is not pulling the card out of the socket due to the mounting bracket being warped or the case being warped. Make sure you have shutdown and powered down the computer before you go poking around it's insides. I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid...