3 week old machine wont boot :(

jimkonow

New Member
hey guys... my three week old computer isnt booting =/
i think its the RAM. how do i put Memtest on a CD to see if its my RAM?
 
First before assuming it's a problem with memory one question would be just what are you seeing when going to run the system on? Generally bad ram will raise flags right at post with an audio alert. That's a beep code of one type or another more then just the single default beep as the keyboard and drive lights blink.

With a system down you would need another working machine with a cd or dvd burner in order to burn the disk image from one of the two main sites for memtest. The latest february 2008 iso images for a bootable cd-r are at the bottom of the page seen at http://www.memtest.org/ The alternate site with some older releases is found at http://www.memtest86.com/
 
If you don't see anything when turning on the system at all that would likely be a failed supply. For seeing fans and drive lights come on a for a few seconds and then everything goes dark that could well point at a board problem.

A bad dimm would likely see blue screens just when Windows was first loading. But since that is a brand new build it's likely a component failure since you were running it for 3 weeks straight without noticible memory problems. On the build here the first board ran good for 3days and then took a permanent vacation.

When pressing the power button fans, drive lights would all startup and then everything instantly shutoff in about 2-3 seconds. If you are seeing something like that you won't be able to run memtest since that needs several hours to repeatedly go through the series of stress tests it places on memory.
 
*update*
everything is fine and is running smooth after a fresh windows install. i suspect that it was video card drivers, as i couldnt get rid of my old ATI drivers due to an error after looking into it. fresh windows, new drivers, all is well :)
 
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