Help with asus p4v533-mx board problems.

[toxzic]

First let me start off by saying hello to everybody im new here, and somewhat new to computers, well the hardware end anyway. My problem starts here. The dell tower i had took a crap on me and was not worth the price of fixing. So my mother gave me her old computer which also has problems. It is a cisnet box, with a asus p4v533-mx motherboard, with a celeron processor on it. Now how she described it to me was this, she woke up one morning after letting the pc idle all night and the screen was frozen, she then proceeded to restart the pc. But it never made it past the bios. She doesn't recall if it had beeped or not as this was several months ago. So i brought it home and took the side panel off to find out she didnt tell me she swiped the video card, and i do not have one to throw in. Now without having a video card, is there any way to find out if it is the motherboard or processor on this pc? I did hook it all up, turned it on, the light on the front does flash letting me know its doing somthing, i put my ear to it, all fans are working and when i put my hand on the hard drive, it is doing somthing, but without video im unsure what it is doing. This pc was only used for about 3years and though it was on alot, the only game ever played was everquest and not too often. It has 1gig of ddr memory, and a install of xp professional. There is 2 processor speeds stuck in my head that it would be, it's either a 2.4ghz or a 2.93ghz. When she got it, i took a look in the system tab, but i cannot remember which speed it is now. I would like to get this up and running, but cost is the issue as im a college student, and paying for a apartment at the same time is killing me. Any help that would get me in a direction of a "cheap" but effective fix would be great. A good freind of mine who works at a bestbuy is going to get me a video card as a present this year for the box, but i dont want him to spend the money if its not worth it.

 

[D-Rocks]

What computer are you using right now? If your using a PC not a laptop just take the Video card out of the computer your using and put it into the one you want check to see if it works. When your down testing the other computer you want to see if it work then just put the video card back where you got it from.

If you do this make sure you ground yourself before touching any components because you could short them out.

 

[toxzic]

well, i did alittle research and found that the board has integrated video, so i did not have to put a card in it... further testing resulted in this... i cleared the cmos, got the video to work, and it will go past bios. i can get it to load half way, it will ask for safe mode, normal boot, last known config. blah blah... but soon as i select somthing, it reboots itself. Another thing i noticed is it does not matter what i do, it will reboot itself. I tried another way, i popped in a winxp install cd, it boots straight into the install, press any key, starts loading things, soon as the blue screen for install comes and it starts loading things, about 15seconds later it reboots itself... no matter what, 15-20 seconds after it passes bios, it reboots itself. never fully makes it to windows.

With all that being said, i called asus and spoke with 2 techs, the first one of course wanted me to clear cmos, i told him i did but whatever. so i do it the way he says, i get back to the same drawing board. the second one i talk to, tells me to stick my nose in the box an smell, sucks cuz i had a somewhat stuffy nose, but i could smell a plastic sorta smell around the power supply an only the power supply. he thinks, that when the computer is trying to boot, its looking for a certain amount of power and the supply cannot give it, therefore resulting in it rebooting and trying again. And its either that or the motherboard is bad. Is there any way i can find out for sure, without spending 50-100$. the closest place here wants 65$ just to tell me whats bad. another problem i noticed, the box had 2 harddrives in it. i took the slave and formatted it, and threw it in this old pc because it only had a 4gig, and 40gigs improved me greatly. but, after about 8-10 hours of it being on, it freezes badly, to the point that i have to pull the cord or turn off the surge protector to shut the pc off. then when i try to boot up again, it does not even reconize the hdd. so i pulled the other hdd from that box, threw it in here, hmmm it does the same thing... whats the deal with that? both bad at the same time? and then the pc wont boot for crap either? i would think, one or the other, it cant be that the motherboard and both hdd's died at once could it? or, did the power supply underpower things and short them?