First thing in the morning, when I try to boot up my PC ...

It gets to the detection of IDE drives, finds them, then the screen goes blank and there is just a flashing cursor ... and that's it ... nothing.

If I try again, same thing.

When the PC has been powered up for about 5 mins (or later in the day) when it is warm, it works first time.

Why !!!?

Would you work first thing in a morning freezing cold :rant:

It's entirely possible that you have a dry solder problem on one of the circuit boards, most likely the motherboard.

Problem is, there's not really any way to test for it...

As the ambient temp in the case heats up the metal in the system expands just incrementally and forms a connection and thus you get things working again... but if I'm right you're likely to see the whole system fail at some point.


Of course it could simply be that you haven't seated a few things properly and the same sort of effect is being caused there. So try reseating all your RAM, expansion cards, etc..

IIRC you were talking about replacing RAM so it's possible you've stressed the board when putting that in... Either way, expect trouble if reseating everything doesn't solve the issue.

Originally posted by Martin_s
It's entirely possible that you have a dry solder problem on one of the circuit boards, most likely the motherboard.

Problem is, there's not really any way to test for it...

As the ambient temp in the case heats up the metal in the system expands just incrementally and forms a connection and thus you get things working again... but if I'm right you're likely to see the whole system fail at some point.


Of course it could simply be that you haven't seated a few things properly and the same sort of effect is being caused there. So try reseating all your RAM, expansion cards, etc..

IIRC you were talking about replacing RAM so it's possible you've stressed the board when putting that in... Either way, expect trouble if reseating everything doesn't solve the issue.

Thanks Martin,

Haven't actually got round to installing new RAM as yet. I'd like to eliminate the current problem before messing around with it.

Am getting severl problems now, ever scince I moved my system in to this new case ...

1) Not booting up while cold.
2) Booting up OK, but then freezing (no mouse / no alt-ctrl-delete / no nothing) at random intervals.
3) SCSI card / HD not working.
4) Wireless Network Card working intermittently (ie. not even in device manager).

I guess all I can do is like you say, make sure it's all seated OK, and try to isolate the problem through process of elimination.

Bloomin computers eh? Who'd have em?

Take it all out, stick it all back in again.. make sure none of the board spacers are in different positions..

Originally posted by Jamie
Am getting severl problems now, ever scince I moved my system in to this new case ...
Ah... there's your problem...

As neeeeek said... take the whole thing apart again and check you've got screw supports where you need them and no spares touching where there's no screw holes...

Check that there's nothing that could be shorting out your board too, like stray wires, bits touching the board where they shouldn't etc...

Then reseat the basic stuff, ie: CPU, RAM, Video card.. making sure that cards are going all the way into the slots..

Try booting up without the hard drive attached.. jump to bios and see if it's still responding to keyboard input after a few minutes.

Then add in a floppy drive and boot using a boot disk... again see if it's responding after a few minutes.

Next up, add in the hard drive... boot up... play around for a bit... see what happens

Add in extra cards (internal modems, USB/firewire extra sockets) one at a time and check again for functionality that last over time...

With a little luck you'll spend a couple of hours going through this and nail down what could be causing the issue or find that you've resolved it...


Just remember to power down each time before playing with anything in the case... Forgot once and zorched a hard drive a couple of years back... Oops...