CAD PC issues (hardware and graphics)

balangproject · 24 Jan 2014 at 17:09

Hi, new to the forum and I figured this would be the best place to help me diagnose a problem I'm having.

Ive inherited an old automotive CAD PC from work (they up spec every few years) and it was working fine until I moved house. Its old but works and they used to use it for CAD so figured it cant be that bad.

Its a DELL, has a Nvidia Quattro graphics card and 2GB ram. Unfortunately Ive never really checked the specs when it was working and i'm not too familiar with PC hardware. Win XP.

When I first set it back up, it would power up but nothing was on screen, changed monitors. Nothing. Opened it up, checked everything was plugged in, and reseated the ram.
Read up about removing ram as a method of fixing some issues. So i started pulling one out at a time until it booted.

It then booted up and I am able to reach the log in screen but monitor feed will simply stop (no signal) and the computer would make a small tick sound.

This is the screen when booting up, obviously I've removed ram.

What do you suggest I do to fix it?
Dont really want to buy another PC if this doesnt work, I know its ancient.

balangproject · 26 Jan 2014 at 22:09

Anyone have any suggestions?

matt_fsr · 27 Jan 2014 at 11:34

Well, not to make it sound too obvious, but the answer is right there

"Diskette drive 0 seek failure" and the ticking sound means your hard disk has died.

New hard disk and you should be able to restore the machine, but you'll need a copy of Windows to install on it, as you won't be able to get anything back off your original hard disk.

balangproject · 27 Jan 2014 at 22:06

Thanks for the input. Tbh i wasnt sure what that was all referring to, so youve certainly helped.

matt_fsr · 28 Jan 2014 at 11:37

No bother.

Judging by the fact that the BIOS was "modern" in 2002, (so I'd guestimate the machine is from around 2004 - 5) it's probably not worth trying to salvate what's left of it, if you're not too sure what you're doing.

If you only want something for general PC usage and nothing specific, replace it with something like this and you should see a big improvement.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FS-321-OK&groupid=43&catid=2476