Jeff writes in with a hardware question:
Q. Hey there. Well I had my computer shipped to another country where I was moving to. I finally got it and tried to hook it up and there were a few problems. The tower itself had power to run start up; the monitor had power as well. But the tower kept beeping, the light that had a symbol of a can shaped object by it kept flashing red. The power isn’t getting to my mouse/ keyboard and isn’t sending a signal to my monitor. The disk drive also doesn’t open but blinks. What is the problem how do I fix it? And could it have broke being sent here?
A. It certainly could have been broken during shipping. You should first check the beep code it is giving off to see if you can determine the cause. Since you cannot see anything on the screen it may be harder to tell since you can’t determine your BIOS manufacturer. Check for beep codes.
The "can" symbol light is most likely your hard drive light so it seems as though your hard drive is getting power. If the hard drive was bad or something happened to Windows you most likely would still get something on the screen. When you don't see anything on the screen it could be a bad video card, RAM, CPU or motherboard. Unfortunately it is hard to tell for sure without further troubleshooting by replacing parts or having them tested.
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