Friend has been having some problems with PC blue screening recently, so asked me to take a look at it.
After getting it home and firing it up, windows consistently blue screens after around a minute, not enough time to do any windows based diagnostics. I decided to boot into the bios and see check the temps and I noticed that shortly after reaching the bios, the output would stop displaying - PC dosen't seem to reboot, its like the VGA output just turns off.
I checked the usual stuff - swapped the RAM around (all stick/slot combinations give the same issue) and removed the GFX card and ran on the on-board VGA. I've no idea whats causing it - if I reboot the machine, the display usually fires back up, sometimes takes a couple of reboots and then I can get to the bios again, but after that, I get the same issue. I've managed to get to and fire the BIOS reset option, and the CPU temps seem fine when I can get to them.
Tried to get to safe mode a couple of times, but the screen disables before its finished loading.
Motherboard is a Gigabyte ga-g31m-s2, RAM is Corsair XMS2 DDR and the HDD is a Hitachi DeskStar. I don't know what and of the rest is because its not labled and she had the machine built by a techie friend a couple of years ago, so doesn't know any of the details.
The only thing I can think of next is to start replacing parts (I'm thinknig the MB is the primary suspect here) but I don't have anything that is compatible with her system, so its going to cost her money if I do that. Any alternative suggestions? I'm sure she will be happy to buy replacement parts if needed, but I want to be confident before I start telling her to spend money.
Any ideas?
After getting it home and firing it up, windows consistently blue screens after around a minute, not enough time to do any windows based diagnostics. I decided to boot into the bios and see check the temps and I noticed that shortly after reaching the bios, the output would stop displaying - PC dosen't seem to reboot, its like the VGA output just turns off.
I checked the usual stuff - swapped the RAM around (all stick/slot combinations give the same issue) and removed the GFX card and ran on the on-board VGA. I've no idea whats causing it - if I reboot the machine, the display usually fires back up, sometimes takes a couple of reboots and then I can get to the bios again, but after that, I get the same issue. I've managed to get to and fire the BIOS reset option, and the CPU temps seem fine when I can get to them.
Tried to get to safe mode a couple of times, but the screen disables before its finished loading.
Motherboard is a Gigabyte ga-g31m-s2, RAM is Corsair XMS2 DDR and the HDD is a Hitachi DeskStar. I don't know what and of the rest is because its not labled and she had the machine built by a techie friend a couple of years ago, so doesn't know any of the details.
The only thing I can think of next is to start replacing parts (I'm thinknig the MB is the primary suspect here) but I don't have anything that is compatible with her system, so its going to cost her money if I do that. Any alternative suggestions? I'm sure she will be happy to buy replacement parts if needed, but I want to be confident before I start telling her to spend money.
Any ideas?