So I fed our Maximum Leader this morning, got my cup of coffee and wandered out to the Catican to read and blog. After reading email and clicking around a bit, the Catican desktop PC froze. It's been doing this a bit, particularly while my daughter's been fiddling with Facebook. I wondered if she'd been "liking" unstable things on Facebook and was whacking the computer.
I grumbled a bit and restarted the machine with the reset button. About 8 resets later, it's locked in the BIOS setup. It gradually went in reverse, being able to do less and less with each reset. First it tried to boot normally, then it couldn't tell which hard drive to boot from, but would let me pick, then it wouldn't even boot in safe mode, then, figuring the hard drive had croaked, I put in a boot CD and told the BIOS to look there, but it never bothered to even spin the thing and finally on the last reset, the BIOS wouldn't even go into the boot menu.
What do you think? Replace the motherboard, CPU and RAM? It's about due for an upgrade anyway. Nothing else seems to be broken.
Comments and suggestions are welcome.
Well, maybe first you could just open it up, blow the dust out, and then ground yourself and go through pushing ICs back in place and making sure memory cards are seated correctly. I find that about 25% of the time, this will cause an intermittently flaky machine to start working again, at least for a while. (I have a minor reputation as an equipment faith-healer from doing this sort of thing).
ReplyDeleteBut yeah, you should probably go ahead with an upgrade in any case.
You're a genius! I reseated the RAM and it worked.
ReplyDeleteYay!
ReplyDeleteSometimes, "laying-on-of-hands" really does work!