PC beeps and turns off when printing...sometimes.

[Guest]

Hi,
I hope someone has heard of this or can imagine what the issue could be.
I have nice quad proc windows XP SP3 desktop.
I have a brother color laser printer.
had both for a couple years...normally run really well.

However when i print sometimes from the desktop or even a laptop, this desktop will beep three times and powers off instantly.

It doesn't do it every time. Seems prone to doing it more when it has lots of apps open, but just last night i printed from laptop and it happened, hardly anything was open on desktop.

There are no networked printers being shared via the desktop, however in past there were. I did remove them from printers list. The brother laser printer gets it's ip from the router which it is directly plugged into.

Has anyone heard of something like this? three short beeps then OFF!...and from a print req on this pc or even another???

It's driving me nuts since i work on this pc. thanks in advance for anything useful!

 

[muz_j]

It's a BIOS diagnostic BEEP and most likely means your PC has a hardware fault of some kind. Check your motherboard manual - regarding the meaning of the 3 beeps as they vary a little between BIOS manufacturers.

eg: http://www.computerhope.com/beep.htm#04

At a guess I'd say probably memory based on the fact that your machine boots fine and runs okay, but in certain situations it fails - but it could also be the CPU or the motherboard or at a really outside chance the drive hosting the system's virtual memory.

Memory can fail over time, so it's not that unusual (I had a 128 MB DIMM fail on me many years ago, but that machine would run perfectly until it attempted to access the failed registers on that particular DIMM - as soon as it did, the machine would blue screen with a memory related GPF).

You need to stress test your components and try to isolate which parts are playing up. Start with your memory with MEMTESTX86 - run it overnight and make sure your memory passes the diagnostics tests - after that move on to stress testing the CPU.