Thread: Dead computer?
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Old January 29th 05, 03:41 AM
Patty
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On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 17:13:48 -0600, David Maynard wrote:
Just off hand I'd say either the processor is dead (and shorted) or the
motherboard is and that's killing the 5 or 3.3 volt rails so that nothing
electronic runs (but 12 volt may be up, or partially up, to spin the CPU
and PSU fans).

I'd first remove all PCI cards, if any, to see if one of them is the
problem (unlikely, unfortunately). Try the hard drive on the PSU by itself
to see if it spins up. Same with the CDROM. If they spin up, I.E. not dead,
then it's either the CPU or motherboard.

Pull the CPU and see if the hard drive/CDROM/floppy light up. It obviously
won't boot but if they light then it's the CPU that's dead. If they still
don't then it's likely the motherboard.


Thanks for the suggestions, but as far as I'm concerned since the
motherboard and CPU are so old (I figure 5-6 years) I'm not sure either
would be easily replaceable even if I found out which it was that was
failing. Turns out it's a Gigabyte GA686LX4 motherboard with a Pentium II
266 Mhz CPU. 32 MB RAM. As I said, she doesn't need much computer to do
what she's doing. I'm figuring I've got an old 200 Mhz AT board and CPU in
a case, just need a couple SIMMs, which I may be able to come with up since
where I work has a number of old AT systems just sitting around unused. I
figure with what we can come up with we can probably build her a similar
system as what she had for no cost to her at all.

Patty