Hello Well I noticed recently that there seemed to be a lot of dust on the grating of my case. I powered off, opened it up and spent some time cleaning the build up with tissues. I removed the RAM and the fans that are attached to my CPU cooller and carefully wiped everything with the tissues, including the sound card and graphics card etc. I thought I was careful but when I powered on again but my monitor wasn't switching on. I checked the connections and made sure my graphics card was seated properly - everything seemed fine. Has anyone got some ideas as to what I did? I'm worried that my cpu might have moved out of place, although I was careful when cleaning around the cooller. I've got a lot of stuff that hasn't been backed up which I'm worried about losing
did you accidently disconnect the cpu fan from the motherboard? its a little 3 or 4 pin connector that usually goes to the top of the motherboard, from the cpu fan. if the bios detects no fan connected it probably wont boot. otherwise check all other wires to see if they are loose, sounds like a power cable, possibly the 4pin atx12v power cable. or the graphics cards 6-8pin pci connectors. well could be any number of things aswell, ram not installed back in properly, did you place the graphics card back in the top pci-e slot?
Oh dear....that doesn't sound good. It's prob your graphics card dude... don't feel too bad, I've done the same thing by lightly brushing a PCB...
yikes! Ye, using tissues is probably the worst idea ever, it leaves a crap ton of dust and can cause static short circuiting. deltatux
Compressed air is your friend! Even blowing on it is better than tissues I would unplug your system from the wall and let it sit for a while (10 min or so) and re-seat your cards, check to make sure no tissue has been lodged in the PCI-e slot. Plug everything back in and power back up, see where you end up.
