Well I finally have a running PC after a few days of pain and some sticky issues. I was going to take some build progess pictures but time and circumstances were against me and so there aren’t any.

To summarise, my PC failed to do anything useful shortly after plugging a USB device into the back, I then went through an ‘I can’t afford it but I need to upgrade’ moment and bought a full rebuild kit for £280. I was forced to change the mobo as I figured that had blown and it was Socket 939 with DDR ram and an AGP GFX card.

So all the new kit arrives, gets fitted and wired up, all cables inserted in the correct orifices and turn on. At this point I was expecting a nice shiny BIOS post screen, but instead I got the exact same symptoms I had previously.

So unplug all cables except monitor - nothing, unplug al HDD’s - nothing. Damn at this point I figured that the new Jeantech Storm 700W PSU I have is the culprit.

PSU swapped, and plugged in all wired up and…… Nothing :0( at this point I’m crying. Last thing I considered was unplugging the RAM as I expected a beep of some sort to come from the speaker on the mainboard (yup I do have one, I plugged it in myself). So RAM removed turn on and…… BEEEEEEEP!

Crap, bad memory? Plug chip into Slot 1 - and machine starts, Plug another into Slot 2 - machine starts, Slot 3 - OK, Slot 4 - no boot. Remove first 3 chips place the last ‘offending chip into slot 1 - machine boots.

So bad mainboard. At this point I’ve nothing left to do but figure on swapping the mainboard. So I continued with repairing windows so it would boot and as part of my auto rebuild mode I updated the BIOS - bit of a silly thing to do if I’m swapping the mainboard but hey at this point I’m tired, have wiped the wrong drive during partition maintenence (luckily only an extra storage drive) and I’m tired.

So windows spent the night updating it’s patches again and during a reboot I decided to verify the issue with Slot 4 and note the exact symptoms so I can rant at some poor schmuck at the store. So plug chip 4 into slot 4 and….. machine boots 80;

It figures that a Bios update fixed something and it figures i just spent 3 days trying to get a machine running when there was a really simple fix waiting there to be discovered by the intrepid explorer.

So I’m Back up and running again, busy re-activating Photoshop because My hardware changed - wasn’t expecting that. And I have also managed to run 3DMark06 and got a score of 7189. the actual results are here if you are interested in the detail.Technorati Tags: Cheap PC Upgrade

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