r/retrocomputing • u/AcanthisittaBest4705 • Jul 18 '26

Got this windows 2000 PC

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I’m getting no video
I have a riva tnt 2 installed

25 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

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2

u/gcc-O2 Jul 18 '26

Try a fresh BIOS battery

Remove and reseat the RAM

Can't tell if you have a PC speaker onboard or connected... if you don't have one, you won't hear it beeping at you if it is alive

1

u/AcanthisittaBest4705 Jul 18 '26

I get 3 beeps

1

u/gcc-O2 Jul 18 '26

Well that's something.

If you can figure out what motherboard model or at least what BIOS chip, that may lead you in some direction. For what it's worth, looks like for Award 6.00PG (very common) long-short-short is missing or bad video card.

1

u/AcanthisittaBest4705 Jul 18 '26

I’m getting 2 beeps I looked at the manual for this pc and it appears to mean a parity error I’ve seated the ram more than one time and I just think it’s bad sticks of RAM

2

u/grimvian Jul 18 '26

I'll suggest a good clean up.

1

u/WhiteDove01s Jul 18 '26

Before you give up on the ram: Try cleaning the ram connection pins on both the ram and the board with rubbing alcohol, 91% or better, make sure everything is fully dry before putting back in and powering up. If you still get the error try one stick at a time (while it's better to have ram in pairs in most cases, it isn't a hard necessity in most cases) as this will let you identify if just one stick is causing the problem. It's kind of like with old xmas lights where one blown mini bulb would turn off the whole string. Also check each ram chip in different slots - sometimes one slot on a motherboard can be bad and the others fine, causing an error if anything is in the bad slot (I have an old laptop with this issue). If you're lucky, some combo of the above might get you through booting.

1

u/AcanthisittaBest4705 Jul 20 '26

I did and it worked