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Easiest Computer Fix Ever — Parallax Forums

Easiest Computer Fix Ever

ercoerco Posts: 20,256
edited 2017-06-11 22:59 in General Discussion
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!

Comments

  • Gotta love easy. They probably made the USB extension out of the same wire as my clip leads.
  • ercoerco Posts: 20,256
  • There selling us some junk lately in standard USB M/F connectors, sloppy fit leads to early contact failure.

    I guess the less you want to pay, they will make up a BOM to accommodate it.
  • ercoerco Posts: 20,256
    Just for fun I dug the cable out of the trash and checked it with my trusty Harbor Freight multimeter. Zero ohms between the ground and +5V terminals! Lucky the PC's USB port wasn't damaged, probably due to the microfine wires in the cable.

    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.
  • Or my kids putting a Nutela bread in the VHS, like a toaster :-)
  • ercoerco Posts: 20,256
    edited 2017-06-13 20:04
    Crummy video playback afterwards, I'll wager!
  • Cluso99Cluso99 Posts: 18,069
    Current computers don't suffer as much from broken cup holders since they stopped fitting them as standard ;)
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