Major Problem with a computer!

[DarkKnight]

Heres the situation: My cousin gives me his old computer because he hates it. He says it crashes often and doesn't want to deal with it anymore. I figure that if I can figure out whats wrong, I can fix it and get a free computer. So I take the computer from my cousin and I bring it home. I hook it up and start the computer and my troubles begin. First, I hear beeps from the computer. there are 8 beeps altogether. Here is the pattern: beep-pause-beep-beep-beep-pause-beep-beep-beep-pause-beep. Another problem I have is that I see nothing on the monitor, even though it is connected properly. I also notice that the LED light on my monitor is yellow instead of green. The computer is a HP Pavilion 7840. Does anyone know why i'm having this problem and how to fix it?

I don't know what the motherboard of the computer is but I know it uses the Intel 810 chipset.

 

[SWirth86]

The pattern of beeps tells you what is wrong......but I forget which beeps stands for what
It sounds like the video card(is it integrated?) is dead. Do you have another video card you could swap into there to see if that is the problem?
If the light is yellow then it means that no signal is being received, but the monitor still has power.

 

[DarkKnight]

yes the video card is integrated. I thought that the problem could be video, but i have no clue why the integrated video would be dead. Well, i guess i could try to find a spare PCI card. Does anyone else have suggestions?

 

[MrBond]

Remember if you add a pci video card, you'll have to disable it on the motherboard. Hopefully you can do it with a jumper and it's not a bios setting.

Other then that, pull out all the cards, unplug all the drives, and try it with just the cpu/ram.

Here's a list of error code beeps, may or may not help though

 

[HelzBelz]

Only HP can tell you about what the patterns of "Beeps" mean.

As posted above, that's exactly what tells you where the computer "freezes".

Find the support page about your system, get the user manual (in .pdf format, usually). A quick search on the HP website will do wonders...

(unless someone here has the exact same computer, with the original user manual...)

Good luck !

 

[Nerdology]

Originally posted by: MrBond
Remember if you add a pci video card, you'll have to disable it on the motherboard.

This is not always true; some motherboards have the ability to automatically treat the PCI card as primary. The experience from which I speak was an old SiS 530-based video on a PC100 598LMR or something... a very disgusting unstable board, fully integrated. It had no way to disable the onboard video, but the Voodoo3 2000 card I added automatically became the primary display, and the onboard video just sat there in Windows 98's Device Manager with an exclamation point, saying the drivers did not support Multiple Display.

 

[Peacekeeper100]

Did he upgrade anything before he gave it to you? I had a similar problems with my brothers computer. Thought it was the integrated video but ended up being the memory wasn't seated correctly.

 

[Bleep]

Bad memory. You see this is the beep code for bad memory and the onboard video uses some of the onboard memory so if the memory is bad you will have no video.

Bleep

 

[DarkKnight]

Well, my cousin did not upgrade anything, but he did take out the ram from the computer. I found a spare stick of memory in my house so i just put it in the computer. Maybe the memory i put in was bad.