Emie, I'd be more curious as to what the customer had recently done with or to his machine.  That's assuming it's been running normally up until recently?

It'd be pretty unusual for hardware-related behaviour like that to pop up out of the blue, unless the BIOS had been radically altered by the customer, the machine had been subject to a power surge or the ram had been changed  to a type that's unsuitable.

Ian Porter
Computer Guys Inc.
Arrowtown
New Zealand
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The NOSPIN Group
http://freepctech.com

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Emie 
  Subject: [PCBUILD] BIOS Error Beep


  ... a walk-in customer brought his WinXp
  Home Desktop system, 512 MB SDRAM, 40 Gig HD CD/CDR-W for the following
  complaints:  intermittent screen freezing, intermittent mouse cursor 'jumpy'
  then sticking til it freezes, keyboard unresponsive, then back to normal.
  The problem goes in a cycle.  Customer noticed when mouse cursor left idle
  on screen awhile, an hour-glass appears for a second and disappears, program
  appears jerky (on the screen) when mouse is acting up.

  When I hook up the CPU for a test,  a 3-long beep code was heard.  I cannot
  exactly remember if the error-beep was for a RAM failure or was it video
  card failure error?  (BIOS= AMI)  Can someone straighten me out on this
  question?  (I know AMI, Award, Phoenix, IBM, etc., all have different error
  beep indications.)  I apprciate the help guys!

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