Not posting

[Daston]

Seem to be the killer of PC's this week

Installed a sound card on my girl friends pc all worked fine booted into xp and downloaded the latest drivers for it. Then rebooted the machine and the sound worked fine. However half way through Everquest 2 she got a high pich squeech and the pc locked up. We thought it was a sound card drivers error so rebooted and choose a older driver, everquest 2 then locked up again (seems quite unstable on her machine any way so this was not a suprise) however when we rebooted it doesnt post to screen........

Her system specs are

Gigabyte SLI
AMD X2 4800+
2gb GeIL RAM
2x 7800 GT's
Sound Blaster Audicy 2

[Samuknow]

Did you remove the card completely ands see if it still happens?

[Daston]

yeah I have and it still dosnt post, could it be a bios error and need me to clear cmos?

[Samuknow]

It would not hurt. I am thinking the driver damaged the os. I had this happen when installing the driver for the nVidia NIC on an NF3 board. Had to repair the OS to get rid of the driver. Did you try last know good config?

[Daston]

I am not getting anything on screen at all I cant even get into bios

[Samuknow]

Try a full cmos reset. Pull the battery and move the jumper. Leave it out for quite a while. Make sure the PSU is unplugged.

[MONKEYMAN]

Graphics card possibly, a failure with high pitched squeal is often related to the graphics card this is especially possible as you cannot progress to the BIOS.

[Samuknow]

You are absolutely right. I just killed my 6800 ( again ) and that is how it went out...If I plug in in now it make a nice high pitched squeal.

[Wolf2000me]

I've had graphic card crashes that would also keep my system from posting afterwards. Cutting power, and reseating the card has always worked.
This happens to me quite often. My 6800 attracts dust like a magnet and when I'm in a bit of a lazy mood and postpone cleaning out the cooler it happens due to overheating.

[booman]

I had a squealing feedback type of problem with FarCry when I origionally installed it. After doing some searching I found other people had the same problem. Someone suggested going to the sounds and audio devices and turning down the Audio acceleration. I moved the slider down one notch and the problem was gone. Its very strange because I never had that problem with any other game, just FarCry.
I didn't have locking up problems though. But if you get it to load windows again, try messing with the audio acceleration.
I have a Soundblaster Live 5.1

[Aedan]

What's the PSU in her machine? EQ2 is incredibly hard on hardware and generally causes hardware to throw out plenty of heat. If you have a spare GFX card, try that in the machine instead of the 7800s. I'm presuming there's no port 80 display on the motherboard?