Boot Failure - No POST, No Video Signal

I tried booting up my Asus P5G41C-M LX motherboard PC last Sunday afternoon, 17th June 2012, and it failed. There was no power-on self-test (POST) nor any video signal going into the monitor. As I do not have an internal speaker connected to the motherboard, I could not tell if there were any warning beeps coming from the BIOS. The only thing that were running are the CPU chassis and power supply cooling fans. The motherboard standby LED was also On.

I was tempted to apply some Electrolube Contact Cleaner Lubricant to the gold contacts/pins of the RAM module but I was not sure if this would help. I do not want to be blamed as I had a similar problem last year with this PC, and it turned out to be a bad motherboard - the store subsequently replaced it for me as it was under warranty. So all I did in the end was to just reseat the RAM module back into the slot. It did not help. The PC still did not boot up.

On the following day, I took the PC back to the store thinking that the worst had happened. The technician did some troubleshooting; disconnected the hard-disk power and SATA cable. It still would not boot up. He the removed the RAM module, took it to his desk and clean it. He then reinstalled the RAM in another slot and the PC rebooted without problems after that. When I asked him, all that he could tell me was that there were contaminants on the the gold contacts/pins on the RAM module.

Perhaps I should have cleaned it myself with the Electrolube Contact Cleaner Lubricant like I did in this previous post on my PCI card. It would have saved me all the stress and worry. Oh well. At least now I know.

Update: 30th March 2015
PC actually froze on the 22nd and 31st August 2014. I coated the pins of the RAM module and memory slot with Electrolube Contact Cleaner Lubricant and have not had this problem since.

Error While Copying A 5.43GB File To A Flash Drive

Misleading Error Message

I tried to copy a 5.43GB file into my 8GB flash drive and I received this error message:

"The disk in the destination drive is full.
Insert new disk to continue."

Followed by another error message:

V2CRS - A TV Recording Scheduler For VirtualDub

A VCR has a timer that enables the user to set a trigger for recording at a specific date and time. Unfortunately, VirtualDub has none.

Theoretically, we could use the Windows Task Scheduler to schedule a recording. The command to run under Windows Task Scheduler looks something like this:

C:\VirtualDub-1.9.11>C:\VirtualDub-1.9.11\VirtualDub.exe /capture /capchannel 30 /capfile "F:\RecordedTVPrograms\CapFile.avi" /capstart 3600s /x

A bit lengthy, and if we start inserting, deleting and modifying existing scheduled task, pretty soon Murphy's Law will set in and we will miss recording our favourite TV program. Much like writing a computer program, we need to debug our 'code'. Not a very good idea. Definitely not user friendly.

My XVid Configuration For TV Capture Using VirtualDub

Depicted below are the XVid parameter settings that I use for my TV captures with VirtualDub. The XVid parameters have been tuned so that I can capture directly into XVid with reasonable video quality. Capture resolution is set at 720x576 - i.e. a high resolution capture. The frame rate is set at 25 fps. Audio is captured and compressed into MP3 at 96 kbps. I do use the sharpen and dynamic noise reduction filters during capture, but not both at the same time as I do not have enough CPU processing power (see Extending V2CRS - Enabling VirtualDub Filters). CPU usage level is about 90% - 110% on average.