Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler PC hardware troubleshooting help needed

Okay, the answer might just be "pay somebody who has more knowledge/experience/tools at his disposal". But I thought I'd check.

The lovely and talented Mrs. Tuttle dumped a glass of water on the surge suppressor for her desktop PC. It stopped working. It is a machine I put together maybe a year or so ago. I took it to a local guy (who seems decent and knowledgeable). He said "the motherboard is fried and the power supply seems okay". I bought and installed another motherboard of the same make/model (Asus P7H55-M Pro).

It still doesn't do anything. There is a lit LED on the mobo, and all the fans spin up, but that's it. No video. I don't hear the disk do anything.

Before I go buy another Core i3 or worse, do you have any suggestions?

Thanks, guys.

Am I correct is my understanding of your post that the computer does power on, Tom? If so, does that motherboard have a small "display" on it that shows the post code? If it's not posting, then the code would help diagnose the problem.

Just a thought.

Good idea, Cam. I'll look for a post code. I don't think it has a display, but there might be something to decode from one or more LED's. Thanks!

Tom, are you sure you connected the CPU's power supply? And if there's a post code error on that board, you'll hear beeps. There will be different beep sequences for different post code errors.

I would check the P/S. One of the rails might not be working now and it is not supplying power to the video side. There is a nifty little tool that allows you to check all the connections out of the power supply, then you will know for sure if the P/S is still OK.

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16899887005

Thanks, Jason!

Okay, to recap THAT project...

I bought a new power supply, the power supply tester and a new processor.

Tested the old PSU - registered HH on the PG value (I think that's "bad"). Everything else was fine. Replaced it. Made no difference.

Replaced the CPU and Voila.

So, I ended up replacing the mobo, PSU and CPU. Ouch.


NEW PROBLEM / Different machine

Does RAM just suddenly go bad?

Subject is an aging socket 939 AMD, MSI Nforce4. It started misbehaving (BSOD 0xA). On reboot, eventually gave me a keyboard error even though USB keyboard was plugged in.

Removed and replaced the battery on the mobo. Reboot with PS/2 keyboard. Boot to RAM Probe disk. Ram Probe goes absolutely nuts with memory errors.

So, it seems like the RAM is bad, but that just doesn't make good sense to me. And I can't really make sense of the Ram Probe output.

There are 4 sticks of RAM in the machine - 2x512MB and 2x256MB.

The machine had been running flawlessly basically 24/7 for YEARS.

I'd love some ideas.

TIA, gentlemen.

Strange things start happening to computers when they get old. Like people, bits start failing.

Try pulling memory out to see if you can isolate the problem.

That's some sage advice from Frederoo. That's all I can add, unfortunately.

Good luck, Tom.

Unfortunately, I have this lovely Zalman cooler on the CPU that makes it impossible for me to pull any of the RAM without pulling the entire mobo out and apart. Harumph.