No signal to monitor?

Help needed with a PC hardware problem (no monitor signal)?

• This will be long because I want to give as much detail as possible. PC: HP M8000, Vista 32bit Mother board (factory): HT2000 Video Card (factory): says ASUS c403hrev:1.03 Monitor: Samsung SyncMaster 932 OK, so earlier this summer, I woke up one morning and my PC was off. I leave it on night. It wouldn't stay on while booting up. Long story short, in my moving from one state to another, somehow the fan to the motherboard broke off of it's harness. So I fixed it by zip tying the fan back against the motherboard and processor tightly. Worked fine for months. Then one day I wake up and it's off again. This time, when I would turn on the PC the monitor would be blank and show that it wasn't getting a signal. How I fixed it was by turning it off and on untill the monitor came on finally. That time and the earlier fiasco both had to be fixed by a windows restore. The system would run through it on it's own. Each time I got my pc back just as I had left it. Everyrhing the same. So.... It's fine again for a month or two. Then one night about a week and a half ago, I be leave it went into an update mode and shut off. The next morning same thing, no signal to the monitor. This time it wouldn't come on with several attempts. I opened up my tower and it was really dirty. I worked on an island this summer and it was very dusty. The motherboard fan had tons of dust caked in between the fan and the (?) don't know what's it's called. It's the metal unit that the fan is attached with that goes onto the processor/board. I cleaned out all the built up dust and blew out as much dust from all over the inside as I could. Put the tower back together, turned it on and the monitor got signal right away, first try. Ok, so then today. I was on the computer and I had my external hard drive un-plugged ever since the last crap happened. I plugged the HD into a USB port and PC froze for the first time that I've seen in two years. Soooo I manually shut it down and went to restart. No monitor again :( so after turning it off and on for several times it finally came on. This time during the windows restore process it froze... Turned it off and again no monitor. So I opened it back up. This time I clipped the zip ties to check Between the fan and board. I figured there could be more dust built up. It wasn't too dirty, but there was a bit of dust on what I think is the processor. But what I did notice is that the heat sink compound is dried up in my opinion. It's kinda more like a dry clay type substance now rather than having a liquid type consistantsy. One more thing I noticed is that the video card has a fan mounted on the bottom. Once I looked up into the fan I see a lot of dust build up there too. It seams like The video card is attached to the motherboard pretty well, I don't know how to remove it. I wanted to unscrew the fan housing and clean it all out. So what are your thoughts? Can dust be causing my tower to not start up properly? The dry heat sink is causing the processor and board to not be cool enough to properly run? What about the dust in the fan of the video card? Why would the pc start up correctly (giving monitor signal) just randomly like that? Any help or idea is greatlly appreciated. Thanks.

• Answer:

  For me the quickest way to decide if a video card works is substitution. I usually have an older but working video card around to substitute for a questionable one. If you can see the start up screens with the substituted video card - then your video card or drivers have problems. On the other hand if a known good substitute video card does not show anything during boot up, you could have mother board trouble. Or you could try your video board in another computer to see if it is the problem. Since you do not seem familiar with changing out computer cards, I would recommend seeking assistance form someone with more familiarity in working on the insides of your computer. The cards are usually readily removable when all of the fastenings are released, DO NOT FORCE IT - you will break something, probably will be expensive to fix or replace. Good Luck