Computer freezes, now will not go thru POST

[medfab]

Hi all,

My sister was playing Soldier of Fortune, when all of a sudden, the game froze. She could not shut the PC down and had to do a forced shutdown by holding in the power switch button. After that she tried to start the machine again but it wont boot, all lights are on, cpu fan is spinning,hard drive spinning and cd rom go on....she shut it down again and restarted. This time the power supply did not even go on. I replaced the power supply, finally the machine responded, cpu fan spinning, hard drive,cd rom all lights are on. But it wont go to POST. I disconnected everything, tried one thing at a time to find the faulty hardware..nothing....I'm thinking is the CPU fried? Does the motherboard need replacing?

She has windows 2000 athlon 1.2 mhz socket processor, 256 mb ram.

 

[grez]

First on my list would be to pull the hard drive and backup any important necessary files in another machine if possible.

Once that is accomplished, I would start again from scratch, one piece at a time as you did before. I wouldn't go any further than the power supply, one stick of ram, and the video card until you see the bios.

A couple of things you may want to do / check:
1)use the bios jumper to reset the bios (computer off, unplugged, check the mobo manual for the exact jumper)

2)If that doesn't work, I would maybe try to replace the cmos battery and try #1 again.

3)If still no response, take the CPU out and look at it (more on the bottom) for burn marks / discoloration.

4)Try the normal items from there, replace video, ram. Be sure also that the cardboard washers are used for the screws on the mobo to prevent shorts. If all that fails, I would try another mobo.

Hope this helps in some way.
grez