[MarkPark]

When I went to start my Dell dimension 8400 last evening all I got were four beeps, a pause, then 2 more beeps. It did this on several attempts, then gave me a blue screen with options to boot in safe mode or system restore. When I tried restore, it gave me the 4 then 2 beeps again and shut down. This morning it booted up normally. Can anyone tell me what the beeps indicate? Am I on the verge of a complete system failure??
Thanks, Mark.

[BG-0]

I just checked what the beed codes mean, and couldn't find what that combination means. Only options making sense were 1-3-1-1 or 1-4-1-1. You sure it wouldn't be any of those? They mean "DRAM refresh error" and "RAM failure on data bits xxx of high byte on memory bus", both being suggested to be solved by reseating memory modules. Of course, it can be something else, not listed, then it could be hte motherboard going fail.

[MarkPark]

Thanks. I'll check the memory modules just in case that's it; but I'm pretty sure it was 4 beeps, then 2. Also, it seems that I cannot get access to Internet on that PC, although that PC can access other PC's on my network. Still a puzzle!

[BG-0]

Sounds definitely like a motherboard issue. If you have a onboard network card, even more likely to be a motherboard issue.

[HitAnyKey]

This is Mark's son posting (I'm at work for a few more hours so can't help him at the machine physically yet) as I had this morning done a google search and found one place (Yahoo Answers) that did have someone give one listing for what that sequence of beeps means. I told him to post here to see if you guys can help him diagnose it further or know of other utilities he can run to diagnose, as I don't have a whole lot of expertise with hardware.
That beep sequence according to the link above is:
4 beeps followed by 2,3,or4 beeps = problem with serial or parallel ports, system timer, or time of day

Hopefully this added piece of information will help you to help him diagnose the problem.