Dawn of the Geeks

Fry’s Electronics had a really good sale this Memorial Day weekend. Normally I don’t buy motherboards from them and I only buy CPUs if they’re in a box but I couldn’t pass up a 4800+ Dual Core 64 Bit AMD Processor with an ECS motherboard for $70. My now old computer was a cheap CPU/MB (2800+ Sempron/ECS) combo from Fry’s that I bought over three years ago and havn’t had any issues with it so I decided to take the risk.

I brought the parts home (a 1 hour drive) and got to work putting everything together. I had also picked up 2GB of DDR2 memory for $65 with a $30 mail in rebate. After everything is assembled I hit the power button. Everything seems to be running. The CPU fan is spining, the hard drive has spun up but nothing shows up on the screen and no beeps.

I figured it might be the video card since it’s an old ATI 7200 card. I pop it into my old system and it works fine. I take my server down and pop the memory into it and the memory works fine. So it’s either the motherboard or the processor that’s screwed up.

Fortunatly my parents live much closer to Fry’s than I do so I haul all the parts to their place and go to Fry’s to swap out the motherboard. I get the replacement to my parents, put everything together and fire it up. No beeps. Nothing on the screen. I take the video card out and it beeps. At least the MB appears to be working. My brother takes his computer apart and I put his video card in. Same problem. Nothing on the screen. No beeps.

Then for some reason he switches out the USB keyboard/mouse for a PS/2 mouse and keyboard. Now everything works.

I was using a PS/2 mouse and keyboard originally so the first MB was definitly dead. But I’ve never seen a motherboard that refused to post if it had a USB keyboard/mouse plugged in.

The reason I had to use an old video card is because the new MB doesn’t have AGP and I don’t have a PCI-Express video card. All I had was an old PCI video card. Which is fine actually. The system is intended for video editing using Adobe Premiere and for web development. My old system is fine for games so I’ll keep it around.