Hi, people,

Last night, about 20 min past midnight, I turned off my PC and all was well. Today, about 20 past 6 o'clock, I tried to turn it on, but it didn't boot.

As soon as I punch the power button, the HD light starts to shine. I get no sound clues, the keyboard simply has no lights on (nor way to turn them on) and the fans seen to be working properly. I get no video in my monitor (because there's no video signal obviously).

I had to come to work, so I didn't have any time to fuss with it. I have an Asus Striker Extreme motherboard and on its led I could read "DET DRAM". I did a few checks online and apparenly the message stucks when there's not enough power to the RAM sticks (I have a couple of 1GB ones). I also suspect they may have simply died away, at least one of them. Or something may have gotten stuck into them and is not letting the PC boot. I don't know, I'm not that much of a PC troubleshooter anyway.

So... any other troubleshooting tips? Things I ought to check when I get back home?

My hope is that I can fix it without having to replace anything... but I'm not getting hopes that up in the air.

Try removing the RAM sticks, then putting them back in - that might work. Or try one at a time to see if you can identify a faulty one.

Also, check the power connections to your motherboard, graphics card, hard drive and optical drives - unplug the cables and plug them back in again.

First when you get home, unplug everything from the power. Keep the PC that way for 10 minutes. Then plug it and start it again. If it doesn't work then do as "nmillar" said about the ram. I had a dead RAM and the PC beeped or something, but it is worth to check.

I had exactly the same problem and at the end it was failed power supply. I am not sure if it is the same problem with you.

Reset the CMOS.
If that doesn't help, it's very likely that you have a faulty motherboard.
I'm on my third ASUS motherboard right now, two previous ones broke and the current one is faulty. I don't think I'll shop there again.
Then again, I am extremely happy with my ASUS laptop.

This is the most likely... people tend to forget that power supplies don't live forever, they don't even last that long at full performance. On average it only takes 1-2 years for a power supply to start entering it's half life at which point the power flow begins to decrease, though it's dependant on the percentage of power you're using and the quality of the power supply itself along with other more random factors.

Looks like your power supply does not provide anymore enough energy to the motherboard. Unfortunately this means that either you PSU is defective, either your cabling is not firmly plugged in the sockets, either your motherboard has died.

I would check the following things

a) open your case. When the power is on on the PSU is the led on your motherboard lit or not ? When you power the computer, is the led continously lid or does it flash ?
b) check the PSU : how dusty is it ?
c) turn your computer on : is(are) the fan(s) of the PSU rotating ? If so, is the rotation speed normal ?
d) check that all cables are well seated in their sockets

Now, how old is your computer ? What kind of PSU does it have ( 80 certified ? ) ? Did you add components lately ?

Thanks for all the suggestions, people.

My PC is about 3,5 years old, some pieces like the DVD RW drive and my secondary HD even older. Only my video board is more recent, from a 1,5 years ago, since my original died away. And I never had to reinstall windows, though I'll get to that soon, since I own a copy of Win 7 and Vista is already getting on my nerves.

Anyway, it just ocurred me that it has been raining a worringly lot lately (something in the scale of all-hell-is-breaking-loose), so I think that what may be happening, in the case of power supply problems is just that the energy power avaliable to my apartment wasn't enough early today.

I recall having a similar problem more than a year ago, though in that ocasion the problem was the lack of an energy phase and I lived in another city actually. But I recall the resulting inability to boot the PC being similar.

When I get home later today, I'll try a simple boot, and if it doesn't work, I'll try the ideas you guys presented here. Once again, thanks for all the suggestions!

Get yourself an UPS, good sir!

I experienced the same symptoms a few months ago. I exhaustively tested every component - the PSU was in good condition and more than sufficient for the power load, my CPU worked, memory had no errors, and so on.

I asked on this forum for advice and eventually took it to ASUS It turned out that there had been a power surge through the phone line which got to my motherboard through the ethernet cable to my modem.

That shouldn't be true. A properly installed phone line is going to be grounded outside the house. Usually what happens is that the modem itself wasn't adequately protected from spikes in the power supply from the grid. A computer being fried by the phone cable isn't something which typically happens for that reason.

You're probably right. Then again, there was a decent surge protector between my modem and the power (not that it matters, since I had left the modem and the entire computer completely unplugged from the mains at the time), and I have a strong suspicion that my phone line is improperly-installed.

Well, either way - the point is that one possible cause of computers simply failing to function is electrical damage to the motherboard itself, and the tech at ASUS informed me that (here in Jo'burg at least) a surge to the ethernet port is very common way for boards to die. Electrical damage isn't covered in the warrantee, but they replaced my board for next-to-nothing.

Edit: Falci, here are a few more suggestions for finding the root of the problem.

First, get hold of another computer that you know works. Load it up with the RAM for your computer. If it still works, then you know that your RAM is probably OK.

Then take your own computer and unplug all hard drives, DVD drives, etc. If you have integrated graphics then remove your discrete graphics card, along with any other cards. Put your RAM back in and try to boot to BIOS. If you still can't then it might be a power, CPU or motherboard issue. Otherwise if it does work then switch the computer off and put one of your components back and try again. Repeat until adding something makes it stop working.

NEVER use damaged RAM - it can lead to bizarre, unexplainable errors across all applications and data corruption of anything that gets (re)written to the harddrive. This is one of the reasons you should always have stuff backed up...

My friend's point is that it could be not dead or damaged, it could just be a simple contact problem. He wasn't the only one to recommend the eraser procedure.

Also, if it doesn't solve it, it will surely freeze up again very quickly.

This stuff can be deceptively subtle... Oh, well - if you manage to get it to work, just make REALLY sure you run it through memtest or something before leaving it inside permanently.