Computer Will Not Boot! Please Help! (Vanity)

I recently formatted and reinstalled Windows to my computer, a Pentium 4 2.3ghz system. Before a reboot I installed Nvidia drivers and installed my HP printer. During the install of my printer it had a conflict with my external hard drive. I turned off the external hard drive and finished the install and went to reboot. Right before the reboot an error message with a red X symbol came up and counted down to 30 seconds to turn off. Once it turned off I went to reboot and it would not boot. I hear no POST beeps, the fans turn on and s forth but nothing happens. Nothing comes up on my monitor either. I have tried both my PCI video card (the aforementioned Nvidia card) and my Intel video card that is built in. I really need this computer to work for school and cannot afford costly repair bills currently. All help will be greatly appreciated!

1. Check to see if your power supply fan spins when you turn the PC on. If that doesn't happen, check the power light (assuming you have one) to see if the motherboard is getting power. If not, then perhaps you have a power problem.

- check the power cord, perhaps try another one (I *have* seen them go bad)

- check your surge strip, if you have one. Mine likes to kick off occasionally and the first time it drove me crazy trying to figure out why nothing would come on.

- if the wall plug is controlled by a wall switch, check the wall switch (don't you just love it when a family member unthinkingly hits that switch without telling you?)

- plug something else into the outlet/surge strip that you *know* works, like a lamp, alarm clock, etc. Alarm clocks are great since they don't burn out, but you *will* lose your time setting when you unplug it.

2. If your PC is getting power but you don't get to the BIOS POST (power on self test):

- LET IT COOL IF IT IS HOT, especially the RAM, since they don't have integrated fans and can overheat if you have your case open or if you have a mass of cables or drives that restrict airflow over them.

- Reseat the RAM. I have to deal with this all the time...

- Try reseating your peripheral cards.

- One at a time, start disconnecting things, making note of what you are disconnecting. DO NOT neglect USB devices. I have a laptop that is notorious for refusing to boot if certain USB devices are plugged in. All it takes is your BIOS USB stack not getting along with just one device, or a device flaking out on you (also happens to me more often than I care to admit).

- Since you have a friend's PC at your disposal, go to your motherboard's manufacturer and download the service guide. One reason why I always buy Intel motherboards is because all that information is always available, and also because they're excellent at fixing BIOS problems with firmware updates. If you're getting POST beeps, then you *need* this manual, and it will probably help you.

- If the power supply fan spins but the power light on your PC does NOT come on, reseat the power connectors to your motherboard. MAKE SURE to put them back in correctly and in the correct order (usually the connectors are idiot-proof but be careful just in case).

- Try disconnecting drives to see what happens. I once had an HP burner that caused Windows 2000 to refuse to see my floppy drive. The problem was that the burner was reporting incorrectly to the driver loader and causing the loader to crash, and the next driver in the list to be loaded was the floppy driver. The moral of the story is that a bad device can cause things like driver loaders, BIOSes, etc. to behave erratically if the loaders/BIOSes/etc. aren't written with enough robustness to handle unexpected values. Lately my SCSI ZIP 100 drive has been causing my PC to not want to boot -- it confuses the SCSI card and freaks the BIOS out. The point is that things like this do happen. My solution was to disconnect the ZIP drive, as I never use it anymore anyway.

3. If you're having Windows problems, it's hard to say. The number of problems Windows can give you is like the number of grains of sand at the shore. All I can say is I stick with Windows 2000 because it's fairly robust and a known quantity.

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