Black screen no signal

[Richard Shepherdson]

Seeking advice.

Upgraded my Dads PC, 2 sticks of 2Gb 400MHz ram replacing 1 stick 1Gb 333MHz ram.

PC old IMedia P4 2.6

PC booted got as far as desk top then screen black no signal reported by monitor.

Replaced old ram still same.

Checked graphic card on friends PC it works fine.

Tried to boot up using onboard graphics, still nothing.

Now it get strange.

Remove all ram, try to boot onboard, get three beeps, insert 1 stick new ram. PC then boots to windows.

Restart no signal.

If I repeat, will boot again, but again only the once.

Nothing seems to be broken, just playing silly buggers.

Bit of googling points towards possibly resetting bios (battery removal and wait).

Any advice greatly appreciated.

[animal007uk]

If it boots to windows then you get a black screen im woundering if the monitor res has changed to something to high or maybe the refresh rate.

As the pc boots up hit F8 as if you were going to try safe mode but choose the VGA option, Forgot the proper name.

This will boot the pc @ 640/480 res.

You could also try safemode and remove the old drivers then boot normaly and update.

[streetfighter 2]

I'd definitely go with resetting the BIOS though I personally prefer using the jumper instead of removing the battery.

There's all sorts of ways the new RAM corrupted settings in the BIOS. Are you sure your mobo supports DDR400 (and 2 sticks dual-channel perhaps)? Does the RAM have SPD timings for DDR333 as a fall-back? The mobo might also just be incompatible with that particular brand of RAM. Occasionally the RAM will only work with certain sticks in certain DIMMs and I have no idea why. Often BIOSes have a quickboot option where certain hardware checks are skipped, you might want to temporarily disable that.

[Richard Shepherdson]

Thanks for quick reply guys.

[Richard Shepherdson]

Reset CMOS using jumper, all fixed, thanks guys.

Advice gave me a little more confidence to try the CMOS reset.