beeps at start up

[themainevent]

Hi, I'm a new memeber here and can use any and everyone's help

Here's my problem:

I normally leave my computer on, and this morning I tried to get onto it. I normally just have to move the mouse and turn on the monitor again to get to the password screen to sign back in, but today I got nothing at all. I decided to restart the computer, at which point I normally get a single, short beep telling me that everything is fine and then windows starts up, but this time it started giving me several elongated beeps and nothing else happened that I could see, as my monitors' power light was changing color as if it wasn't connected to the computer.

Long story short, what do those beeps mean, and what can I do to fix the problem on my own??

***EDIT***

Ok, I was just looking through some other posts about different problems and figured some other information would be helpful. This is a computer that I bought all the components brand new about 3 years ago, and a friend put together for me at the time, and other then the occasional virus(very rare), the computer has worked superbly the entire time. I am under the impression through earlier posts that it might be a video problem, but these are elongated beeps, not short beeps, so I don't think it is. Here are its specs.

AMD Atholon 1700 processor
256 MB DDR RAM
All-In-Wonder Radeon Video card(not sure the series anymore)


If there's anything else needed, just ask. I'm not even getting a BIOS screen to come up either, so I was wondering if it actually was a video issue, or something else. PLEASE HELP, NEED COMPUTER ASAP!!

[Ken6PPC]

It sounds like you have some hardware failure, or possibly something that has vibrated loose. I'd check all the connections first (both inside and outside the box). If I remember correctly, three long beeps mean a keyboard error. This could be a loose keyboard connection, a bad keyboard, or a bad keyboard input device on the motherboard. I hope it isn't the latter!

Good Luck! ...KenT

[Ken6PPC]

It looks like what the beeps mean depends upon your BIOS. Check out this web site:

http://www.computerhope.com/beep.htm

Good Luck! ...KenT

[themainevent]

Thanks for that info. Ken. I was actually able to get ahold of a friend of mine who is in my view a self taught genius when it comes to many aspects of computers. He's the one who put mine together, and he claims that it was a RAM problem. It apparently was, because I went out and purchased a new set of RAM and installed it, and my computer works wonderfully now.

Again, thanks for your help, I do appreciate it a lot.

-Charlie aka themainevent