So...My PC died today.

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Eric.

Eric.

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I really don't know what has caused it to fail, but I came home from school today and it wouldn't come out of (what appeared to be) standby. I figured something had crashed so I manually restarted the system. The case lights and fans came on, and nothing. I switched over to the AQUOS, still nothing. That rules out the monitor and DVI connectors. I opened it up and did a little checking. Video card still connected, check. No bad smells, check...

With the side panel still off I hooked up just the AQUOS and the power cord and after a few tries I managed to get it to boot. I put the panel back on and plugged everything back in after I turned it off. After a couple more tries I was able to get it to boot again, and I chose to boot into XP. Everything went fine until I was logged in. It appeared like explorer.exe hadn't started up because I was left with my desktop icons and my background. No taskbar and nothing worked.

Any clues what would be the problem? I'm thinking that it is the video card. It is the first thing that displays when it starts up and it makes a beep after it checks how much VRAM there is. It wasn't beeping when it didn't boot.

I'm taking it to the guy the built it for me Saturday. It has a one year warranty from him and the parts are all warrantied by Newegg for a year.
 
Have you recently added any ram? Perhaps one of the sticks has gone bad or is not seated correctly. Even if you havn't added any, a stick could still be bad. Take one stick out at a time and see if that fixes anything.
 
Sounds like a PSU issue. Like, the computer died, but the fans/lights and all that stayed on...


Might want to look into a new PSU mate...


If it WAS the PSU, I'll pray that it didn't take anything else with it.
 
standard235
Sounds like a PSU issue. Like, the computer died, but the fans/lights and all that stayed on...


Might want to look into a new PSU mate...


If it WAS the PSU, I'll pray that it didn't take anything else with it.
Click to expand...

I'll try the RAM after work if I get a chance. No big deal if the PSU did take anything out. The entire thing is warranted for a year.
 
Googling "no taskbar" comes up with lots of suggestions.

This is not a hardware issue, it's an OS issue, something in Windows, and probably just the user profile, is confused. The source of the confusion could be malware or an accidently changed setting. (The taskbar can be made too small to see.)

If you have other logins, I'd bet a different login would be working correctly. Also, starting in safe mode might prove interesting.
 
If you can get Ctrl Alt Delete to come up, go File, New Task... and then type in explorer.exe

See if that works. If not, then I have no idea.
 
The damn thing has been fine all week now. I was about to cart it off to the computer shop to have him take a look at it, but I decided to check the RAM first. It fired up once I pulled the second stick out. I put it back and it has been fine...So maybe it had come out of the socket a little. Who knows? The missing taskbar was purely a user error. I had been using the AQUOS before and it wasn't appearing on the Hyundai 19" monitor. Turns out I just needed to go through a little sequence of enabling/disabling the two monitors.

All good now it seems. :cheers:
 

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