[OT] - pc dead

[Laurence Mason <laurence@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The family PC has stopped working and I would like some inspiration!

The pc was on and working but no one was using it. On returning to it
the screen was blank, would not display, touching mouse and keyboard did
not turn the display on (as it normally does). System powered
immediately off on pressing power button (no need to hold for 5 seconds)
i.e. o/s not running and must have rebooted to POST.

Powering on the pc again produces various beeps but no output to screen.

two short / quick beeps
8 'normal' beeps
pause
2 beeps
1 beep

The motherboard is a M848A rev 2.1 with I believe AMI BIOS.

T'net suggests that 8 beeps is related to the video card - so I have
reseated this and also tried booting without - same error.

I had earlier in the day added some memory but this had gone okay and
the PC was working much better - XP has become so patched and bloated
(or children had downloaded so much stuff) that it now does not really
run on 256M so had increased it to 512M.

I have removed the extra memory and reseated the original and this has
made no difference.

I have found one screw floating around inside the case (which should
have been holding down the mother board) - it's possible that it shorted
something that it should not have done. However, I am also sat here
waiting for the boiler to be repaired under contract as the hot water,
but not radiators, have not worked since Monday - it appears the built
in timer is not functioning correctly. On Monday we had a power cut
(whilst the pc was on and it worked okay immediately afterwards) and I'm
wondering if there was a surge associated with it that caused some of
the components to be stressed leading to premature failure of the PC and
cripple the heating controller? Am I likely to get any help from the
power provider? How does one prove such things?

I had put this machine together a couple of years ago with a colleague
where I was then working and we had access to spare boards etc - this is
no longer the case which is a pain so I am open to suggestions!

Thanks,

Laurence