My Weekend

I actually had a dream earlier today .. that they were introducing the new i7 Intels onto the iPhone...wouldn't that be so extra sweet? :)) Anyway here's my weekend. On saturday after visiting a cousin for his birthday I was asked to fix 2 PCs. Both of them AMD's one has an AM2 socket proccessor I don't really know what it is and the other has a 754 socket Sempron. Both of them were supposedly working at some point.

So I take on the AM2 one. Plug it in try to power it up ..nothing happens. Opened it, took at look at the cables and power source, everything seemed to be ok, turn it back on again still nothing. And by nothing I mean the state in which the computer powers up but doesn't even load it's BIOS or anything. So I start taking it apart, trying to change each part at a time to find out what the problem was. At one point when I reassembled it on the floor ( basically had the power source connected to the motherboard which was placed on a cardboard thing, and then I stuck some RAM into it ) it actually booted. And though the HDD wasn't connected the computer itself was working fine, I was able to look around the BIOS but there was nothing weird there. When I tried to restart it, it went back to it's original "stupidly do nothing" stage. And I haven't been able to figure it out. The thing is I don't have another AM2 socketed proccessor, nor AM2 socketed motherboard, cause then I could have changed between them.

Next I tried the other PC, the Sempron 3100+ ( i think). This one would boot up no problem, even boot windows, but after a few minutes of usage it would restart itself and keep restarting until you took the power cable out. First thing I thought was that the CPU was overheating. But after a few tries and tests that was no the problem. Next I thought that it might be the power source, because a weird buzzing sound came from it. So I changed it. Still nothing. I said what the hell ..let's try the RAM. This is the point when things got screwed. I took out the RAM card, and replaced it with another one (it's DDR1~400). The computer wouldn't do anything, got into the exact state that the other PC was in. Meaning powering up but doing nothing else. I changed back to the original RAM card but still nothing happened. So now I have 2 PCs with the same symptoms, different builds and no ideea on what is really wrong.

I would appreciate any suggestions you might have. Cheers, Geeky