I brought home a friend's computer. He said was infected, but when I tried to power it on, it won't. Gives me this code: one short beep, pause, one long beep, pause again, over and over. The computer is an HP Pavilion a1642x, Mobo says in big upper case PSBW-LA. I opened the case and tried to reseat what could be reseated but it still does the same. I did a quick search and found it is a System Board Problem.
Sounds like you are looking at replacing the motherboard... or there is a short somewhere. Unplug ALL the drives, remove all PCI cards and the video card if there is onboard video.... so you are just running the minimum and try at boot it again.
Never, ever approach a computer saying or even thinking "I will just do this quickly."
Every picture I have seen of this MoBo does not have on board video yet the one I have at home does have on board video. I have seen the pictures of this MoBo right there where the "On board video" is there are a set of like little dots. Is it possible that there are video cards that go in that spot? I know it is a silly question but it does seem like the "Video card" is just the plug attached tin between the digital audio and the i_1394. Well I just had to ask
Different models and revisions to places like HP,Compaq Emachine,Gateway and others can produce just what you are describing. 1 revision had no onboard video and another did.
Who knows why but i have also seen it a number of times.
Best advice is do what NooNoo and OMGmissinglink said
Remove all hardware down to video and 1 stick of ram and try it that way to see if it boots
Gigabyte 990XA-UD3
AMD FX 8120 OCTO-Core
Windows 7 Enterprise 64
Adata 120 gig SSD
Kingston HyperX 1600 16 Gigs
Sapphire 7770 1gig
Enermax Liberty Modular 620 www.northernaurora.net
I would suggest trying putting in another video card if you have one available to swap out. If you already tried different memory I'd assume the onboard video adaptor is bad somehow.
The only other thing I suggest is taking out any other cards and starting up the computer. If it works then try putting in one card at a time until you get it beeping again. It could be a hardware conflict if one of the devices is faulty.
One Script to rule them all.
One Script to find them.
One Script to bring them all,
and clean up after itself.
Nothing as in "it's still doing the same thing" like, still one short beep, puse, one long beep, pause. I do not have another pci video card, and the only thing in the expansion slots was an old modem which I also took out. Nothing was on that MoBo but the processor. I plugged it in and the beeps go off again.
Well I did try to reboot it with one stick of memory then with two. I took it to fry's and it turned out that it was 1 memory stick gone bad. I guess I shoud have tried one and THEN the other (pretty ovbious huh?). Oh well, one more valuable lesson learned today. By the way, thanks to all for the advices I received from everyone. I tried them all (or so I guess)
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