PC Died

[jpanhalt]

PC working fine last night when it was turned off. This morning, fans come on and the little blue LED indicating disk activity turns on, but nothing else. Monitor acts as if in stand-by (LED blinks slowly). Turned PC off (hard off) and on, seemed like it was going to start, then shut down, then came back up on its own as just described.

My first guess (hope) is that it is power supply, and the supply-good signal is not getting sent.

Do you agree that is the most probable fault? What can I easily test to pin-point that fault? I hate blindly swapping components, as that can get expensive.

What are the second and third most probable faults? All heat sinks, including the CPU seem to be in place. The machine is about 4 years old, but has had very low usage until the past 2 weeks when it became my primary PC at the farm. In other words, this is the first time it has been left on continuously throughout most of the day.

PC was built from decent components from a local DIY PC center on Ohio (MicroCenter). It has an Asus MoBo P5QC, Intel CPU, power supply is a "Silencer" from PC Power and Cooling (OCZ Group),
disks are WD, display is NVIDIA Quadro (installed to run SolidWorks), memory is PC2 8500 (also OCZ) .

Thanks, John

 

[picbits]

Unplug all components - HDD / DVD etc
Remove graphics card if it has another one onboard the motherboard

Give that a go - if it still doesnt work then pop a cheap PSU in and see what happens. CPUs rarely die and memory is pretty reliable so I'd go with motherboard after that.

 

[kubeek]

Bad memory really should not interrupt the powerup sequence, but if you have two or more sticks try them one at a time.

Usually faults like this are either the PSU or the motherboard.

 

[dr pepper]

Sounds like maybe a power supply to me too (lack of 12v), but if the hdd light is on maybe the hdd itself is dead.
Try putting a bootable disk in the cd drive and see if it starts up, if it does then see if you can access the hdd, if it doesnt back to power supply.
Look for a spare 5 1/4 disc drive power connector from the psu, theres usually a couple spare, from black to red you should have 5v, from black to yell 12v, if you go on the motherboard power connector black to ora you should have 3.3v, I think power good on the motherboard conn is violet cant quite remember.

 

[jpanhalt]

Thanks all. Spent an hour at MicroCenter and my favorite salesperson (Pat V.). She agreed on the PS, so I have a new one in the car. This time it is a Thermatake 750W, 62A @12V and for $80 (net after rebates). That fails, we already picked out a new Pentium i7 CPU, Gigabyte mobo, and some DDR3 memory. That will probably force me to upgrade(?) to Win Pro 7.

Currently, the machine does not even get to POST. No chance of testing a HD or using a boot disk. OCZ's site has a diagnostic to do for the PS. I don't really trust it for testing the 12V rail, but we will see. The OCZ 750W supply is still under its 5-year warranty. But, I am not sure I can wait long enough for a swap. It has been 3 years without Internet at the "farm." When I got Internet on July 22, it was better than getting married -- and a lot cheaper. That will be my new anniversary celebration date.

John

 

[DerStrom8]

Yep, My machine did something similar to that a few months ago. I'd turn it on, it started up, but never got to POST--it would suddenly just shut down without warning. After replacing just about everything--video cards, motherboard, processor, fans, disconnecting all unnecessary parts, and it kept doing the same thing. Turns out it was the two filter caps in the PSU. Replaced those and the thing fired up like a charm, haven't had a problem since (been a couple months). It was strange, when I'd tried testing it with a different, known working PSU, it still didn't work, but then the next time I tried it , it worked fine. Anyway, it probably would have been cheaper to replace the caps in your existing PSU, but if it is also 4 years old, I'd say it's about time to be replaced anyway.

I suspect that as soon as you pop that thing in your computer will work perfectly. If not, I have a Gigabyte motherboard, Core i7 processor, and several other parts that came out of mine, if you'd like to buy some used ones

Good luck!
Regards,
Matt

 

[jpanhalt]

My good soldering iron, box of capacitors, desolder braid, and magnifying visor (I'm 70) is already packed for my return to the farm tomorrow.

John

PS: We had several days last week of temps in the mid to upper 90's. The log home is not A/C'd. That might be a factor

 

[Mr RB]

Clean and re-seat all the connectors especially the RAM sticks, IDE drive connectors and any plug in cards like video cards etc. 90% of the time that will fix it.

PSU caps do go, but don't often give that symptom of working perfect one day and complete failure to boot the next day.

 

[jpanhalt]

It looks like the mobo and/or cpu are bad. New PS, new video card, wiggled everything, same result.

Anyone have opinions or experience with the following:

MoBo = Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD3h Socket 1150 (ATX)
CPU = Intel i7 4770K 3.5 GHz (quad core, 8 threads)

Memory = DDR3, 1600 -- 8 or 16 GB? ( I currently have just 2 GB DDR2 and windows XP). I know I will need a different OS for that much ram. Any comments about Win 7 Pro?

My main question regards the MoBo and CPU. The rest is pretty much a commitment forced by that choice.

John

 

[DerStrom8]

To be honest, I am quite surprised that the PSU didn't fix it....

Anyway, I have found Gigabyte mobos to be very good and will last you a while. Just make sure you buy a processor that fits the specified socket. Processor sounds very good. As for RAM, that really depends on what you do with the computer. If you do a lot of processing/graphics-intensive stuff, or have a lot of programs open at once, then you'll probably want 16 gigs. If you just use it for everyday work, 8 gigs should get you by just fine. Again, just make sure you buy the right RAM for the motherboard

I have used Windows 7 Pro for about 3 years now, and would certainly recommend it. It's set up a bit different from XP, so it might take you a little bit to get used to it, but it works very well and I like the layout.

So in summary, provided you have checked that all the parts fit together correctly (right socket type, etc), you have the makings of a very nice rig.

good luck!
Matt

 

[mvs sarma]

Contaminated SATA plugs or power plug to SATA HDD could also be culprits. very rarely the bios fails.

 

[jpanhalt]

My new Gigabyte MoBo and Intel core i7-4770K (LGA1150) have been up and running for 15 minutes as I write this. No sparks or smoke.

Need to register all sorts of stuff, which is a PITA. I have 4 legal copies of Windows XP, and I am not 100% sure which one was on the burnt out PC. Of course, I will be updating to 64-bit Windows 7Pro soon, but not today.

NEW QUESTION:
One of the system fans (a case fan) goes to a 4-pin connector on the new mobo, but only 3 wires to the fan. They are apparently: GND, +12V/speed control, Sense, and VCC. The VCC pin is not connected. What does it do? Is it for an "intelligent" fan? I need the fan to run at full speed. Will its current connection do that?

John

PS: The new PS is "modular". Now I don't have lots of extra wire and dozens of extra connectors laying about. I like that and will keep it just for that reason, even though the old PS is just fine.

 

[tunedwolf]

I scrapped several Gigabyte boards for a client due to mysterious bios corruption, causing what appears to be a dead board. Having pulled the flash off later and reading it in the programmer, it's almost as if the flash had leaked back and wiped itself in places. Either way, it happened randomly and I was unable to pinpoint the reason. Blowing the firmware back into the flash chips fixed the boards though. Asus boards were fitted instead and are still going strong

 

[jpanhalt]

In my situation it was the Asus board that died after 3-1/2 years of very light use, except for the past few weeks(since July 22) when it became my primary PC.

Unfortunately, there are no unbiased performance and failure rate data available. Anyway, my Gigabyte is up and running. Assembled easily. Seemed well designed -- there were no buried SATA connectors like there were on the Asus.

One surprise I had from Asus when I called it about a BIOS problem was the tech service person told me that Asus provides no engineering input into the design of its boards. I haven't had to call Gigabyte, but one might wonder whether all boards of this class are designed on some screen, where the named vendor simply checks off what options it wants, then the boards are made in one batch in a giant factory in China and printed with whatever labels and heatsink colors the vendor wants. For the consumer it is a crap shoot. If you get a board from a good batch, you are happy; if you get 4 boards from a bad batch, you are disappointed.


Now, I am on to negotiating the change form 32-bit to 64-bit. I was perfectly happy with Win98 and always had a little regret about having to update to XP, since my favorite indexing program was never updated to XP. Nothing I do needs 64 bits. Not even my genome is 64 bit.

John

 

[kubeek]

As for the 64bit part, the main reason to go 64bit is that it enables you to use more than 4GB ram.

 

[unclejed613]

just my 0.02.... go to a linux os if you don't have a dire need for windows. there's a linux program called Wine that allows most windows software to run in linux... my advice would be to load linux as a dual boot with windows, so you can see what works and what doesn't, and gain some familiarity with linux. that way, if you find you really need a piece of software that requires windows to run, and doesn't run with Wine, you can always revert back to windows. there are many distributions of linux geared towards windows users, so the learning curve on them is pretty easy.

 

[jpanhalt]

Thanks for the suggestion to go to Linux. At least there are options.

Well, my eBay copy of Windows 7 Ultimate arrived. Counterfeit, of course. The only surprise was how amateurish it was -- a Light Scribe disk with inkjet printing. EBay/PayPal gave me an immediate full refund. By immediate, I mean it took less than 5 minutes. No back and forth with the seller was needed. Searched on "counterfeit Windows 7" and got quite an education.

Have now ordered Win 7 Pro 64 from a legitimate source and expect it early next week. Got a 128 GB SanDisk SSD to install it on.

@DerStrom8 (and others):
You mention using Win7 Pro for sometime. Was that the 64-bit version? Are there any major incompatibilities (e.g., with Eagle or MPLab) that you have noticed? What did you go to for e-mail?

John

 

[DerStrom8]

@DerStrom8 (and others):
You mention using Win7 Pro for sometime. Was that the 64-bit version? Are there any major incompatibilities (e.g., with Eagle or MPLab) that you have noticed? What did you go to for e-mail?

John

Hi John--

I used Windows 7 Pro at work and it works great, yes it was 64-bit. Apparently a lot of people don't realize you can run 32-bit programs on a 64-bit OS, but you can. I had absolutely no incompatibilities at all when running win7 64-bit. The only thing Ultimate does better than 7 has to do with deep down administrator stuff, which few people even know about, so Pro is a great choice. As for email, I have used a wide variety of them, mostly web-based ones. AOL, Outlook, and Gmail, to name a few. I don't usually use offline services for my email.

Regards,
Matt

 

[panic mode]

Wine is nice but has limitations. dual boot is ok if one does not mind rebooting. i prefer virtual machines. at work i use VMware, and at home VirtualBox (which is free, available for various operating systems and very simple to setup and use). Then you can have real deal OS rather than emulation and anything that was running on dead PC can still run inside VM (you already have multiple XP licenses).

as for compatibility, any N-bit OS will run N/2-bit software but not N/4. the way to go is 64-bit but many 32-bit applications are using 16-bit installer. this means the problem is to get the software installed and if you get past this hurdle, it will work fine.

my favourite indexer is Everything (used along with Agent Ransack). Everything is screaming fast, it indexes entire HDD in seconds, but it does not look inside files. Still very handy little tool.

 

[jpanhalt]

The reason I asked about e-mail is that I use Outlook Express (OE). Windows 7 does not support it. Microsoft offers a free download for a new program, "Live Mail." (https://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/products/features/email )

Superficially, Live Mail looks similar to OE. What I like about OE is the ability to keep e-mails locally (including a file tree like Explorer), back them up, and export them. So, I have lots of old receipts, tax correspondence, etc., and pictures of the grandkids. I don't want NSA to have access to the latter.

Outlook may still be supported (I have an old copy), and worse comes to worse, I may go to that.

John