First boot... constant tone

[Publicradiohead]

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

All the fans are spinning, the ram seems to flash

No signal on the monitor.

I did a bad thing I think.

[The Wise Monkey]

What does your motherboard manual say?

[bighoo93]

For me, the spinning fans with no monitor was due to my failure to plug in the 4-pin connector from the PSU into the motherboard. I did not hear any beeps either, though.

[Publicradiohead]

doesn't talk about the codes... but I found the site that said it could be a short?!?!

[Publicradiohead]

just needed to pci-e some more juice to the gpu. :)

so... now it beeps once, quick.

all the fans are spinnin', lights flash on the mobo near the ram... but no bios or video?

[shyster]

Ok so that statement "just needed to pci-e some more juice to the gpu." means you just pluged in the power cord into it?

Other than that what are your current hardware specs? Hard to diagnose a problem if we do not know whether we are working on a plant, animal, or human...

Most obvious guess on no video though would be that you are using a P5KC with an E8400 CPU. If your setup is anything other than that, specifics are needed.

[Publicradiohead]

e8400
gigabyte p35-ds3r
4gb gskill
evga 8800gts 512 -- just one
gamer extreme

Thought I had it figured out, but then didn't.

Seems that Vista only sees a regular vga adapter, and nothing for the soundcard. :(

And now I got things all out of order.

Thanks for helping Shyster

[RickyTick]

Try booting with only 1 stick of ram. If it fails, try a different stick.

Load Vista SP1 as soon as possible.

Download latest video card driver from Nvidia.com.

[The Wise Monkey]

Vista doesn't come pre-loaded with the latest nVidia drivers - it only comes with a generic VGA driver that will work on almost every graphics card. Installing the new graphics driver should be one of the first things that you do. :)

[Publicradiohead]

done-and-done.

cue the pomp and circumstance track -- I dust graduated!

Thanks for all the great walk through and great support.