Posted on 11/29/2007 4:37:39 AM PST by Chickensoup
Thanks, with the three computers and the new software available even a full time outside the home single working mom can homeschool three children. The fourth one went to college. I am so fortunate.
Sorry for the delay--I was traveling yesterday.
The Great Karnack says...
1. Hardware
2. Video card
When I finally got in, the CPU memory was at 100% usage.
An old Systemtec 2003 and something called Digital Square was eating space. Both removed and even put the old CRT back on. Victory!!
Are you saying these may be causing the software glitch?
I am thinking of getting a new screen for this computer but I need an non VGA card so I can watch movies.
Sorry for the delay—I was traveling yesterday.
Thank you.
The constant travel of the tech!
No, I am saying a hardware fault caused the blinking red light. Most usually, the video cards and RAM are the hardware in question.
BTW: I would completely remove that 2003 version of symantic.
BTW: I would completely remove that 2003 version of symantic
I did and I took that digital thing off too. Came with the box.
First of all, someone mentioned the cables: Make sure that the monitor cable is securely fastened to both the monitor and the computer's video card - you'd be surprised how many computer "problems" are merely a question of a cable coming loose [for instance, if you suddenly lose sound, then it's probably because a cable jiggled loose somewhere between the sound card and the speakers].
Second - somebody above mentioned the system RAM as a possible culprit. While it's certainly true that bad RAM would probably give an error beep on POST, RAM has no moving parts, and is pretty darned durable.
About the only thing which can hurt RAM would be a voltage surge on your power line - when you woke up that morning, were all the digital clocks in your house blinking "12:00", to indicate that you'd had a power failure [ergo possibly a voltage surge] the night before?
You can get voltage surges from lots of things - usually lightning, occasionally a squirrel or a possum will crawl into the neighborhood transformer and fry himself, sometimes when you get a really nasty car wreck, the car will take out a utility pole, and obviously bad storms can throw tree limbs on power lines - but most of that stuff tends to happen in the warmer months, and is much less common as we head into winter.
Personally, I'd be looking at the moving parts within computer itself: The power supply, the hard drive, and the CPU fan.
If you are getting some electrical activity out of the computer when you turn it on, then your problem is probably not the power supply [although some of the power supplies nowadays - like the new EPS12V's - are getting so sophisticated that, in theory, they could be "partially" broken - the main line 12V power might be down, but there might be enough juice on one of the auxiliary 5V or 3.3V lines to power the POST beeping].
Personally, though, I'd look at the CPU fan and the hard drive.
If the CPU fan has died, then the system BIOS might not allow the computer to boot for fear of overheating [modern CPU's can get really, really HOT!], so I'd check that first.
And if the hard drive has died, then the system BIOS might be beeping to tell you that it can't find anything to boot from.
By the way, both the hard drive & the CPU fan act by spinning [obviously the fan spins, but internally, the hard drive is just a bunch of magnetic platters which spin around at anywhere from 5400RPM to 15000RPM], so they both have a tendency to perform very poorly in cold temperatures.
You mentioned the problem happening in "the morning", so it's possibly that the room was so cold that either the CPU fan or the hard drive platters had trouble spinning up to their normal RPM's.
By and large, computer equipment tends to get really flakey problems like that below about 60°F, and it really thrives at 70°F or above.
By and large, computer equipment tends to get really flakey problems like that below about 60°F, and it really thrives at 70°F or above.
Boy I forgot that ... the old day with the ORIGINAL IBM portable in the trunk in the middle of winter.
If you've done it before, or if you have a "green thumb" for things electronic, you can re-seat the DIMM's -- basically just take them out and put them back in their socket, as if you were upgrading the memory to bigger DIMM's (larger memory) perhaps, but just reusing the current memory. That will improve the electrical connection if it has gotten weak.
Slightly fancier, you can erase the contacts on the DIMM's while you have them out with a pencil eraser, but then you need to be careful to (1) not zap your memory with static electricity, and (2) not get any erase dust back on the connector where it could block the signal. But it does remove more of the corrosion that might have accumulated on the edge connector.
Even fancier ... use contact cleaner spray and an itsy bitsy wire brush, but good contact cleaner is hard to find outside of shops selling to professionals.
I usually only do any of the above however if the particular beep boot code on failure indicates memory failure. Many PC's will give subtly different boot failure codes, depending on just what critical component the boot ROM found to be failing. If you can track down that code for your PC, you can determine just what stopped working.
Help needed:
I have AVG anti virus on my machine but have recently been getting threat detections for something called JS1 Dowloader_Agent. The program heals the file, but doesn’t seem to get rid of the virus because it’s still there when I run it again.
Anyone have any ideas how I can clean it out? The computer is really starting to slow down.
Hi Ronin,
My first thought is to boot to safe mode and run AVG from there.
Whether or not that works, might I suggest that AVG AntiSpyware is a terrific companion for AVG Anti-virus (or any other AV).
Download and install it, update and scan. If it fails to remove the critter, try it again in safe mode.
Let me know.
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