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I would greatly appreciate your help. I have tried just about every forum on the net with no success. Here is my problem:

About every 10 minutes my computer will make a two tone beep (low-high)regardless of whether I'm on the computer or not. It comes from the case speaker while I'm in XP. There are no visible problems other than the beeps. My system boots up ok, runs fine, no lockups, etc. There are no error messages that I can see. Device Manager shows no conflicts. But obviously something seems to be wrong.

I have tried removing and reseating cards, memory modules, bank arrangement, etc. I checked for loose wires, grounding problems, and shorts. I disconnected the cdrom and cdrw but it still beeps. This is not a heat problem as far as I can tell. All voltages look ok. All alarms are disabled in the BIOS. My BIOS is showing normal temps for the system as well as the cpu. I am not running any special motherboard monitoring programs. The BIOS is set to normal defaults and I'm not overclocking. I am a novice and this is the first system I have put together. Unfortunately, it is turning into a nightmare...

Here is my new system:

Epox 8K3A+ Ver 1.0
AMD Athlon XP1800+
Samsung 512MB PC2700 Ram (2 x 256MB Sticks)
Maxtor D740X 40G HD ATA 133
Abit Siluro GF2 MX400 w/64MB RAM
AOpen 24X10X40 CDRW
AOpen 56X CDROM
Dlink DFE 530+ NIC
Mitsubishi 15" LCD
Windows XP Pro

Has anyone seen this problem before? Epox support was unable to solve this issue. I have searched the internet endlessly, but have been unable to find an answer. I did, however, come across two posts in some obscure sites that describe my exact problem (two-tone beep every ten minutes) but nobody replied to their posts. I am ready to throw my pc out the window...your help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

JCP

LAST EDITED ON May-04-02 AT 08:35 PM (EST)
 

>About every 10 minutes my computer will make a two tone beep
>(low-high)regardless of whether I'm on the computer or not.

Like its turned On and your not using it??

>It comes from the case speaker while I'm in XP. There are no
>visible problems other than the beeps. My system boots up
>ok, runs fine, no lockups, etc. There are no error messages
>that I can see. Device Manager shows no conflicts. But
>obviously something seems to be wrong.

Does the sound start before or after Xp Loads? For Example if you turn your computer on and go to your BIOS and let it sit there for an hour .. Will your system Beep?

By the way .... Are you using any type of UPS with this computer?

>Like its turned On and your not using it??

Yes, that's correct. The reason I mention that is that it was suggested before that perhaps I am clicking on some program that is causing the beeps. But if I let the computer just sit there while it's on and read a magazine five feet away, I will hear the two tone beep coming from the case speaker every ten minutes.

>Does the sound start before or after Xp Loads? For Example if you >turn your computer on and go to your BIOS and let it sit there for >an hour .. Will your system Beep?

No it will not beep until it launches into XP. By the way, I do get the one beep at bootup, which I assume is correct.

>By the way .. Are you using any type of UPS with this computer?

No I am not. I am plugged straight into the wall. And the case power supply is an Enhance 300 watt (model ATX-1125BTA ) unit.

Thank you.

JCP

Boot to a floppy and see if it still does it. Larry

Hi Larry,

Could you please explain to me what your reasoning is for booting from a floppy? As I mentioned, I'm a beginner as far as building a computer is concerned. When I put my system together, I booted off of the cdrom...all I did was insert the XP cdrom into the cd drive and everything loaded from there. Now in the BIOS, I disabled any checks of the floppy drive so as to speed up boot times into XP. My boot sequence is cdrom, then hdd. Thank you.

JCP

From what I can tell .. Larry is trying to determine if it is a software problem or a hardware problem. If you were to boot up off of a startup disk and left your computer on for an hour and it didn't beep you would know that it is something in XP. If on the otherhand it beeped during the time it was sitting there booted off of the floppy you would know that its hardware.

Thanks Brian. The answer is it only beeps when I go into XP.

JCP

Does it beep in the Safe Mode? Press F8 just as Windows is about to boot. Somehow I suspect something like the MSN Instant Messenger... Larry

The problem has been solved! Thanks to Brian and Larry's suggestions, I tested my system in both the BIOS screen as well as the Safe Mode. There was no beeping evident in either screen. So it looked like a software problem...probably XP. So I started digging and exploring XP left and right, and I discovered a little thing called Event Viewer. Here I noticed a frequent error that kept popping up every few minutes...IPSEC can't be found or something. So I went into Start, Run, then services.msc and tried starting and stopping anything that looked like it might be causing that problem. I eventually found the sucker, and as soon as I enabled it, the errors went away COMPLETELY. No more beeping. And my system is running as smooth as silk and extremely fast. I really want to thank Brian and Larry for responding and for really trying to solve my problem. Other sites were quick to blame my board or memory...but you guys took a logical approach, and now my system is fixed. Thanks again.

JCP

>soon as I enabled it

What was it? Larry

Unfortunately, it was late at night and I went through so may different options that I don't know exactly which one did it. But the problem was definitely in services.msc. As I said, as soon as I turned this particular option on and started it, the error messages stopped appearing in the Event Viewer. The error would say something about 'cannot find manager' or something. I noticed that in the Event Viewer, you will often get info messages about different software you might be running. But this was not an info message, it was clearly marked 'error', and it was happening over and over again, as I said every few minutes. What I've learned is that Event Viewer is a helpful troubleshooting aid...thanks.

JCP

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