My roughly 2-year old system was running fine until about a month ago when upon switching the system on I would get an odd series of beeps: 2 - 8 - long pause - 2 - 1. The system would hang after that with a blank screen, no video information ever sent to the monitor. The D-LED bracket with those four diagnostic LEDs hangs with LEDs # 1 - 3 green and #4 off. I found that if I leave it sitting like that for a few minutes and hit the reset button, it will boot normally with no error messages. I looked up the beep codes for my board, an MSI KT3 Ultra2 v1.0 with AMI BIOS v5.7. Two beeps stood for some kind of parity error, while eight meant some kind of display memory error. But I didn't know if one error was causing the other or not. I posted this on the MSI board forums at PC Perspective and most of the responses indicate a possible failing video card. I don't have another video card to test it with, but am working on getting one off a friend or e-bay. Anyway, has anyone else experienced this before?
The rest of my system:
Athlon XP 2000+ running stock speed
2 x 256MB Mushkin PC3200 and PC3500
ATI Radeon 9500 Pro 128MB running stock speed
Seagate Barracuda HD (forgot how many GB)
Windows 2000 (I think Service Pack 4)
mauser
