i was on the basement comp downloading mp3s when all of a sudden the pc restarts by itself..so i said "meh whatever"
waited till it got back up to login screen, put in my pw and it froze. restarted again and it did the same thing. shut it down for 10 minutes and started it up, and now there is nothing displayed on the monitor and there is just a loud beeping noise coming from the tower. beeeeep...beeeep...beeeep etc.
sounds like a hardware problem to me. beeping at startup can mean bad or incompatible ram, could probably also mean some other piece of hardware is not working.
first i'd open it up and make sure everything is securely connected. if it is or it still won't start up i'd start pulling out hardware pieces and trying to reboot to try and isolate what piece of hardware has the problem.
If you have more than 1 stick of ram, use 1 stick at a time and try booting. It's also possible that one of the slots is broken so you may want to test all of the slots with each stick.
If your motherboard came with a manual (or maybe your whole system manual may do), check for what the beep pattern means. Single, slow and non-stop beeps usually mean bad CPU or RAM. A long beep followed by 3 short beeps (and then stop) usually means bad video card. I'm betting RAM though.
Open the case (as long as this doesn't void the warrenty on your system) with the power supply OFF -- flip the switch on the back of the power supply, but don't unplug it unless there's no such switch. Clean it out with a vacuum cleaner with a can of air if available. A good cleaning keeps parts cool and running well. If it keeps beeping, try reseating the RAM.
By keeping the power supply plugged in but off, you can ground yourself by touching the P.S. case itself. Avoid touching any metal part of your vacuum to anything inside the sytem. I use the high suction adaptor with the long thin opening.
by any chance was there lightning/thunder outside? sounds like something a power surge would cause. if not, do as said above and try reseating your RAM and check if all components are connected (even though it's weird something would disconnect)
As jomo said, it's probably a hardware error. Check to make sure that you have all the connections secured (keyboard, mouse, etc..) Then check your ram and your cable connections. If that doesn't work, try pulling out all unnecessary cards (extra usb slots, audio card, etc..) and boot with your bare minimum (video, mouse, keyboard, monitor). Hope that helps.
