>I can’t believe it, I let a computer fall into disrepair. I’m not sure of the seriousness of the situation, but my 3ghz HT P4 would not start. It turned on, but there were no diagnostic beeps of any kind to indicate what might be wrong, or that it was booting.

I opened it and was greeted with one of the sights I chastize for: an entire case coated in grime, dust, and hair. It’s not as bad as someone who smokes (I’ve done a lot of those) but cat hair is right up there. The CPU fan was coated with a blanket, much like lint in a dryer, the front pull fan was coated and mucked up, as was the rear exhaust fan.

I spent some time cleaning things out but it still woulnd’t boot. I removed all the cards and tried it again… but with the CPU fan off I couldn’t even feel the chip get warm. So something was going on with the BIOS. I had reset it at various points in the diagnostic but to no avail, it just didn’t want to boot. I threw the chip into Nicole’s computer and bam, it started to get hot to the touch in secconds.

It’s not the chip at least, and that’s the most expensive part. Granted the motherboard cost me like $200 but that was 3 or 4 years ago. It’s an Asus P4P800 Deluxe, the top of the line for when HyperThreading first came out, but now it appears to be the source of my troubles.

I’ll eventually pull it out and boot it up outside the case, testing the individual components with the 512mb of RAM and Celeron D chip from Nicole’s computer. I put the HT chip and the gig of Kingston in her computer for now, along with my DVD Burner.