Easiest Computer Fix Ever
erco
Posts: 20,254
The wife's desktop crashed before a week of vacation, so I had that repair job waiting for me. Looming over me all the while, casting a pall over our entire Cancun trip, I could barely enjoy sipping endless mojitos by the pool.
Dug into it today. The problem originally started after the power got shut off for a second. It wouldn't boot, never got past the HP splash screen, and no combination of steady holding and madly tapping the F1/F2 keys on powerup would lead to the boot menu. I had assumed the worst, hard drive failure, but swapping in a good (?) Windows 8 HD had no effect. After unplugging all the USB cables in back, I wiggled & reseated all the power connectors and SATA cables. Reattached just the power & monitor cables and she booted up just fine. Reattached the USB cables one by one and tested bootup. Lo & behold, one particular cable was causing the whole no-boot problem. It went to her keyboard through a short USB extension cable, surely a dollar item I got from China. That was the problem! Took it out and all's well. I chucked it, not even worth debugging but perhaps a short inside that dropped the voltage and causes MoBo problems.
Burned by my own preference for cheap Chinese parts! Bad erco!
Dug into it today. The problem originally started after the power got shut off for a second. It wouldn't boot, never got past the HP splash screen, and no combination of steady holding and madly tapping the F1/F2 keys on powerup would lead to the boot menu. I had assumed the worst, hard drive failure, but swapping in a good (?) Windows 8 HD had no effect. After unplugging all the USB cables in back, I wiggled & reseated all the power connectors and SATA cables. Reattached just the power & monitor cables and she booted up just fine. Reattached the USB cables one by one and tested bootup. Lo & behold, one particular cable was causing the whole no-boot problem. It went to her keyboard through a short USB extension cable, surely a dollar item I got from China. That was the problem! Took it out and all's well. I chucked it, not even worth debugging but perhaps a short inside that dropped the voltage and causes MoBo problems.
Burned by my own preference for cheap Chinese parts! Bad erco!
Comments
I guess the less you want to pay, they will make up a BOM to accommodate it.
Several years back one of my kids stuck a coin in my last PC's SD card slot. That instantly fried a trace on the multicard reader board. I could smell my way to fixing that problem.