mikelx21
New Member
Several months ago I had built my first PC and at the start everything seemed to be running fine. However, for the past few months I have been experiencing problems with crashes to my system not only during gaming sessions, but also during regular use (i.e. surfing the web etc...) My monitor would go blank and I would hear high pitched sounds coming from my speakers. I would shut it down via power button and try to turn it back on. The computer would turn on but the monitor remained blank, then I would hear 3 beeps (a beep about a half second long then 2 shorter beeps) coming from the in-case speaker. Everything would turn on but the monitor is still blank and Windows will not load. This would go on until finally windows loaded (after I restart it like 10 times). I thought it could be my video card overheating but the tempatures seemed to be fine, so I figured it had to be a power issue. I have quite a few things running in my PC (two 36 gb raptors, GF 6800, opticals, 7 case fans, fan controller, mobo etc) all running on a 500W MGE PSU. So I decided to unplug everything except for the graphics card and the HDD's to see if that would help. Sure enough it did help as my computer seemed to run stable for a while. Then one day I had to use one of my opticals so I plugged it back in, and sure enough...it crashed again after a little bit of use. I unplugged it again and windows worked fine, BUT even with everything including the opticals unplugged, it still crashes every once in a while. Would it be safe to say that my PSU just has a bad power rail or two? could it be something else? Can the problem be fixed by replacing the current PSU with a name brand PSU? Could it be a CPU? Do the beeps mean something?