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I'm sick of dealing with my PC. Half of the parts are from my friend and after having it out of commission for like a year, I can buy a computer with its specs for 1/5 what I've had to spend on it. From now on, I'm going to build my own computers and get parts from stores rather than trusting someone even if he's built a billion computers before. I don't have a friend who also has a PC (damn all those people with laptops) so I can't test each individual part to see what is giving me the problem and most computer stores charge so much that I might as well go and build a brand new computer. I know that Fry's charges $60 but I was wondering if there's any private places in the Bay Area that does it cheaper. I tried looking on Craigslist but half of the places I called had disconnected phone numbers and the ones I was able to reach sounded kinda shady. I just want to know what's wrong with my computer so that I can actually fix it. If anyone around here wants to help me out, I'd love you for it. Thanks.

what is it about it that doesnt work? I could try to help you if ya gave me a few descriptions of the problems you are having.

Nothing in any of my PCI slots work. My TV tuner and sound card aren't being recognized by my PC at all. I tried to uninstall the drivers but couldn't reinstall them because the program couldn't detect the hardware as being installed in my computer. I found out about this after the fan was basically fried off my video card and I had to RMA one of my sticks of RAM. Oh, one of my hard drives also decided to go bad awhile back. I want to know if this is my motherboard that's being mean or my actual sound card/tv tuner; I don't have any friends who own PC's (darn all the laptops at college) so I can't test it out. That and I'm just kinda sick and tired of this PC but I need it because I can't play games like Oblivion and Rise of Nations on my laptop. *stops ranting*

Originally Posted by vietgurl Nothing in any of my PCI slots work. My TV tuner and sound card aren't being recognized by my PC at all. I tried to uninstall the drivers but couldn't reinstall them because the program couldn't detect the hardware as being installed in my computer. I found out about this after the fan was basically fried off my video card and I had to RMA one of my sticks of RAM. Oh, one of my hard drives also decided to go bad awhile back. I want to know if this is my motherboard that's being mean or my actual sound card/tv tuner; I don't have any friends who own PC's (darn all the laptops at college) so I can't test it out. That and I'm just kinda sick and tired of this PC but I need it because I can't play games like Oblivion and Rise of Nations on my laptop. *stops ranting*

how old is the pc, what are hte specs, have you tried to wipe the hard drive completely and reinstall windows? Also, by any chance do you have a gateway?

Originally Posted by BasketCase1080 how old is the pc, what are hte specs, have you tried to wipe the hard drive completely and reinstall windows? Also, by any chance do you have a gateway?

I built this PC...with the help of my friend (well, his help was that he told me he was better than me at getting cheaper parts...) I've formatted the drive a bunch of times and reinstalled Windows to no avail. These are my specs

3.0 GHz P4
1 GB RAM (one of the 512 sticks died but I got it replaced)
Abit SG-72 motherboard
550W Power Supply (I just upgraded from a 400W so if anything happened, it was through the 400W JGE Power Supply)
Geforce 6800 GT 256 MB Video Card (I also just upgraded this from a 9800 Pro that was fried)
Soundblaster Audigy LS - currently not working
ATI TV Tuner - currently not working

I'm not good at working with the BIOS so if there's something that I might be doing wrong there... I just need some help with this computer before it becomes obsolete

I would suggest dowloading 'Active Killdisk' and run that program to completely delete your whole hard drive, and then just do a clean windows xp install so it "should" reinstall all the drivers for you. (clean install just means install to a hard drive that has nothing on it.) Also, are the sticks of ram the same brand?

Originally Posted by BasketCase1080 I would suggest dowloading 'Active Killdisk' and run that program to completely delete your whole hard drive, and then just do a clean windows xp install so it "should" reinstall all the drivers for you. (clean install just means install to a hard drive that has nothing on it.) Also, are the sticks of ram the same brand?

Yup, dual OCZs

It's most likely the motherboard.

You mentioned that one of the fans on your video card got "fried." I would guess there's either a problem with the Southbridge chip on your board (are your USB or integrated devices working correctly?) or it's not supplying the correct power to the AGP/PCI slots.

If the latter is true, your cards are probably dead as well.

That's depressing

Word of advice- if you think it's dead, and it's not under warranty, just chuck it and get another part. I used to spend hours trying to figure out hardware issues- but now that I have 4+ machines in my house, I can test the individual pieces very easily. Paying for a monkey to look at your computer is often not worth it- one time I took a buddies machine to a place and the guy didn't have a clue- and eventually came to the same conclusion that I did, the Dell power supply sucked ass and couldn't feed the video card (this was 4 years ago). He said we were fooked, so I removed his DVD decoder card, modem and unhooked his regulard cd drive (he had a burner as well) and viola- magically the computer worked with the vid card- we tried plugging in the other stuff one at a time and every time the thing would die when games started up.