Lights are on but nobody's home!

[IanW34]

Hi

My PC intermittently goes into "Lights are on but nobody's home" mode.

That is I will be working away and all of a sudden the screen goes blank (monitor remains on but goes into 'no signal' mode), though the PC is still powered up in that the power LED is illuminated and all fans are still spinning.

The PC cannot be revived except by hitting the reset button or powering the machine down & back up.

There are no messages in the Event logs that hint at the problem and I also did a reinstall of XP (not for this reason) and it's still doing it.

It doesn't seem to happen as a result of doing anything specific and occurs maybe once a day on average (twice on Saturday over an 8 hour period).

One time it happened just after I started copying a load of files from one drive to another, and at the point it happened the drive activity light stopped flickering, which suggests that it's not a monitor fault and possibly not even a graphics card fault as you might expect the file
transfer to continue if this was the case.

Sounds like motherboard, RAM or CPU to me, but does this sound symptomatic of any particular one? Any ways to test without having to buy new components first?

Ian

 

[kmcferrin]

Power and heat are always concerns. Are all of your fans spinning during normal, lights on use? What hardware is in your PC, and what sort of power supply are you using?

Are you having any other power issues at your place? Light's flickering, etc? Since we're now into the hotter months (at least up north), getting clean power becomes more of an issue as people start using more air conditioning, etc.

 

[firewolfrl]

Ok what are the specs of your system? including the ram type?
I had the same issue and was able to fix it by increasing the voltage to the ram
here is my post

http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1388068&page=1

I had the same issue you have now...this happened in both Vista and XP. Though Vista just says it was a Blue screen after the reboot.
just to note if that is your issue no amount of cooling will work though heat will make it worse

 

[HalComps]

to be honest doesnt sound like a ram, motherboard or monitor. sounds to me its a power supply or this could indicate an acpi issue and it requires either a bios update, or turn off acpi and reload windows with a standard hal.

 

[Sleepsalot]

The more I look at this I think bad caps on the MoBo. Causing the video to drop out. Look in the area of the video chipset to see if there are any with bulged tops. Also excesive heat in the case. It would help to have the specs of the machine. Brand, CPU, chipset, Memory, PSU wattage, harddrive type and brand.

Life is a big Roleplaying adventure.

Wayne

 

[firewolfrl]

As I said I had the exact same symtoms...and I thought mine was power supply too ....lol....it wasn't

 

[IanW34]

Hi

My system is a home built one consisting of: Abit AS8 m/b, P4 LGS775 3.2Ghz CPU, 1GB Geil dual channel DDR, 460W Akasa PSU, 36GB Raptor SATA, 250GB Hitachi SATA, HP DVDRW, Liteon DVD, M-Audio Delta soundcard, Audigy 2 soundcard and a Radeon 9700 Pro gfx card.

I did actually buy a new PSU today (could only get a 400W one), and it was going OK until I was just on the last sentence of replying to this thread 10 minutes ago, then it went again <sigh>. So it doesn't look like the PSU.

Firewolf - what did your prob turn out to be?

I could try increasinbg voltage to RAM but I've had this machine 3 years and it's only recently started doing this. Must admit, heat has always been a concern because I have the base unti in a cabinet. The P4 also runs at a fairly high temp as it is, so I originally got a fairly large Thermaltake heatsink/fan. Here it is:

http://www.creationfactor.net/misc/DSC00822.JPG

The heat has never caused the machine to crash though, just to beep if I play games or encode video, so I don't do that!

Ian

 

[firewolfrl]

mine was a new build
and my problem was voltage to the ram was too low.
I would cut out the back and remove the door in front of the desk. You should look into a new case with 120mm fans. Antic makes some good cases that cool well.
heat may be some of your issues as components are starting to age. upping voltage may fix your issues but build more heat.

Boy you sure are in a catch 22

looking at your MB specs...You should have no issues upping the voltage to the ram...do it in small increments