Possibly related: My computer was going slow so I shut it down and used a can of air to get rid of dust. After starting it, my mouse and keyboard no longer worked. I restarted again and they worked fine but when it tried to load the main screen (after I logged in) it just pixilated.

Now the pixel images are all I get when I try to start my computer. When it starts up there is 2 short beeps which is the error code for Parity circuit failure. After googling this, it is probably my memory but it can also be my motherboard or something entirely different.

It is a computer that I have had for about 5 years and I have not upgraded anything in awhile. My operating system is Windows XP SP2.

Any advice anyone could give me on how to proceed would be appreciated.

Remove and then reseat your RAM.

Thanks, I did that and no longer get the pixilated screen (I assume its not coincidence). It still will not boot but I get this error now- SATA Primary drive 0 not found. I can also get into the setup utility.

And I assume there is no harm in leaving my computer running despite the possible hardware problem.

You need to verify in your BIOS Setup that your boot drive is set to be the boot drive.

If it is that SATA drive you need to verify that that SATA channel is set as the boot channel.

under drive configuration in the BIOS, it has the SATA Primary drive as an unknown device. I didnt see any place with a boot channel, but thats probably just because I am a novice although I am pretty sure I looked through everything.

Re-do all your connections.

Appears you blew pretty hard

that was it, after rechecking all the connections I found one loose.

Thanks for the update.

So all is well now?