I have been tasked with fixing my neighbours PC :rolleyes:

When you hit the power button, you can hear the fans running and the lights come on. There is no video signal, as the monitor will not fire up, the strangest thing is that it just clicks.

I took the side off and booted the PC without the PCI cards ( one at a time) - no difference, put the cards back.

The clicking noise if coming from a little speaker on the motherboard, the pc just sits there clicking indefinateley. I have checked the IDE cables are in place and any other obvious connections.

Can anyone shed any light on this ? is the clicking some kind of alarm?

The PC is a Parckard Bell iMEDIA jobbie, when it works it runs ME.

Any suggestions gratefully received.

cheers,

Mike.

Sounds fooked.

The first thing i always try is unplug everything, PCi cards, IDE cables the lot and fire it up. This helps to ensure that it is nothing external that is causing the problem.

Next step wold be part swapping from another similar machine, try PSU, and processor if availble to determine where the fault lies.

From the sound of your fault my money's on Motherboard.

ok will do, would anyone know why it clicks - I thought puters bellepe3d when some thing was wrong?

If there were a CPU/memory/graphics card fault then I would have expected, as you suggest, to hear some bleeps. However, perhaps the clicks are as near as it can manage to bleeps? Might have a dodgy speaker or something.

Working on that theory you should take a listen and see if there is any pattern to the clicks. It might also be worthwhile taking a look to see what sort of motherboard it is and if you can download a manual for it. I don't know what goes into those machines. The manual would give you some idea as to the pattern of bleeps, or even clicks, you might expect to associate with various problems.

There have been a lot of bad rays coming from the sky over the last few days, I wonder if they might have killed a few systems? Either way you are probably going to have to start swapping in spare bits to see if you can find what is wrong.

Sounds like Hardrive...

Hard drives on the way out do click so that is a possibility, specially if there is something very odd going on in the drive. However, generally if it is a faulty drive the machine at least attempts to boot and will give you a display and a warning message. It is possible that there is some sort of short, or similar, in the drive that is pulling the whole board down.

My first thought was the HD as it happened to my old laptop, but there is a noticable difference when you put your thumb over the speaker.

As for clicks, they happen about every second or so, and they dont stop like "proper beeps" do as the machine eventually boots up - this thing never boots.

ok, the story so far....


I have tried t with both IDE's out, ram out/swapped slots etc,

gphx card out, pci modem out, blah blah



the machine powers up, the fan on the proccessor spins, the har5d drive sounds like its doing something - but there is feck all appears on the screen, this is the same whether the monitor is plugged into the on-board socket ot the AGP grpx card.

is the MOBO kernackered? - if so whats the best plan of attack?

have done a bios reset as per the manual, the board is a MS-6340, some bull from the manual below:

1-1
INTRODUCTION
The MS-6340M Micro-ATX VA mainboard is a high-performance
computer mainboard based on VIA® KM133/KM133A chipset. The MS-
6340M is designed for the AMD® Socket processor for inexpensive business/
personal desktop markets.
The KM133/KM133A chipset consists of the VT8365/VT8365A
system controller (552 pin BGA) and the VT82C686B PCI to ISA bridge (352
pin BGA). The system controller provides superior performance between
the CPU, DRAM, AGP bus, and PCI bus with pipelined burst, and concurrent
operation.
The VT82C686B integrates all system control functions such as ACPI
(Advances Configuration and Power Interface). The ACPI provides more
Energy Saving Features for the OSPM (OS Direct Power Management)
function. The VT82C686B chipset also improves the IDE transfer rate by
supporting Ultra DMA-33/66/100 IDE that transfers data at the rate 33/66/
100MB/sec.
This mainboard which supports KM133/KM133A chipset coupled
with VT8365/VT8365A and VT82C686B is ideal for high performance, high
quality, high energy efficient and high integration desktop AGP/PCI/ISA
computer systems.
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
1-2
1.1 Mainboard Features
CPU
l Socket A for AMD® PGA Duron/Athlon processor.
l Support 550~1.2GHz or higher processor. (Standard product support up
to 1GHz. 1.2GHz will be implemented upon request.)
Chipset
l VIA® KM133 VT8365/KM133A VT8365A chipset. (552 BGA)
- FSB @200MHz/266MHz
- AGP 4x and PCI Advanced high performance memory controller
- Support PC100/133 SDRAM, & VCM technology
l VIA® VT82C686B chipset. (352 BGA)
- Enhanced Power Management Features
- Integrated Super I/O (FDC, LPT, COM 1/2, and IR)
- Dual bus Master IDE Ultra DMA33/66/100
- Integrated Hardware Sound Blaster
- Direct Sound AC97 Audio
- ACPI
- Support 4 USB Ports
Clock Generator
l 100MHz/133MHz clocks are supported. (200MHz/266MHz Internal
System Bus)
Main Memory
l Support four memory banks using two 168-pin unbuffered DIMM.
l Support a maximum memory size of 1GB (32M x 8).
l Support 3.3v SDRAM DIMM.
Slots
l One AGP(Accelerated Graphics Port) slot.
- AGP specification compliant
- Support AGP 2.0 1x/2x/4x
l One CNR(Communication Network Riser) slot.
l Three 32-bit Master PCI Bus slots.
l Supports 3.3v/5v PCI bus Interface.
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
1-3
On-BoardIDE
l An IDE controller on the VIA® VT82C686B Chipset provides IDE HDD/
CD-ROM with PIO, Bus Master and Ultra DMA 33/66/100 operation
modes.
l Can connect up to four IDE devices.
On-Board Peripherals
l On-Board Peripherals include:
- 1 floppy port supports 2 FDD with 360K, 720K, 1.2M, 1.44M and
2.88Mbytes.
- 2 serial ports (COMA + COM B) or 1 serial port with 1 VGA port.
- 1 parallel port supports SPP/EPP/ECP mode
- 4 USB ports (2 Rear Connectors/USB Front Pin Header)
- 1 IrDA connector for SIR/CIR/FIR/ASKIR/HPSIR.
- 1 Audio/Game port
Audio
l Chip Integrated
-Direct Sound AC97 Audio.
l Creative® CT5880 (Optional)
- PCI 2.2 compliant.
- 3D audio effects.
- 32-voice XG wave table synthesizer.
- Direct Sound/Music Hardware Accelerator.
- Full-Duplex stereo.
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
BIOS
l The mainboard BIOS provides “Plug & Play” BIOS which detects the
peripheral devices and expansion cards of the board automatically.
l The mainboard provides a Desktop Management Interface(DMI) function
which records your mainboard specifications.
Dimension
l Micro ATX Form Factor: 20.8cm x 24.3cm.
Mounting
l 6 mounting holes.

forgot to say - it doesn't even click anymore - cock all :(