On 10/20/2014 12:43 PM, Peter wrote:
Bit of a general PC repair question here, but it's one on which I was hoping to install openSUSE, and I can't even get past the first hurdle.
An ex-friend-turned-trou-de-cul (French people are never your friends, only future enemies) donated me a P4 desktop which supposedly worked fine but upon switching on, it only lasts a few seconds before going off. So although I can access the BIOS, I cannot even get to make any configuration changes in time before it turns off.
Of course I've done a first check for loose or wrong connections. My hunch is either the motherboard or PSU is at fault, but these are things I cannot test as I have no suitable alternatives available. I'm going to embark on a systematic process of elimination with some of the other parts, but does anybody want to throw a suggestion into the hat as to what is usually at fault in this situation? I'm not going to examine every part to provide detailed specs just yet, suffice to mention that it has integrated Intel 965 graphics, so it can't be that old 'unseated video card' chestnut.
regular readers will recall that I enjoy working with 'decommissioned' equipment from the "Closet of Anxieties". There are many failure-modes in a corporate setting, and many of them don't involve the equipment not working, for some suitable value of "working". Many of the items simply don't work with later versions of MS-Windows, but when has that ever bothered us Linux-weenies? But sometimes equipment *IS* broken. Sometimes the boot sequence goes very, very weird as in one tower I played with recently. Consistency was not its long suite. The ruberick in electronics for the last century is that solder joints are the #1 failure mode. They can fail in many ways. Even if they don't actually fail they can act as diodes, grow hairs (which is death on a tightly laid out multi-layer PCB). Then there's capacitors. Even if you don't have ones from the Era of the Plague, then still do odd things, polarise, depolarise, crack, explode, leak or stop working for anonymous reasons. And resistors ... Unless your 'amis' has been overclocking, the CPU is probably OK. Ironic isn't it? But please don't try pulling and replacing the CPU. You'll probably do a lot of damage. My experience with "decommissioned" and "recommissioned" equipment is that they can be "a learning experience". I've had a wonderful time with old, slow, underpowered , memory starved desktops (that never overheat), and with old, slow, low capacity disk drives (that seem to live forever). I've had PSUs die, PSUs blow up, motherboards fry and burn. But I've also had my share of systems that simply don't work in various ways for reasons that don't seem to be easily explained. Its the marginal, the intermittent ones that are frustrating. Visual inspection of the mobo _might_ show something up, breaks, burns, loose components, solder joints discoloured. I believe there is a tool that lets your cell phone act like one of those IR spotters. It may take hardware hacking and might damage your phone. http://www.instructables.com/id/Poor-Mans-Cell-Phone-IR-Filter/?ALLSTEPS Suggestions for mobo problems include using a hair dryer to heat specific parts, or a can of spray coolant to do the opposite. -- Excellence is not an accomplishment. It is a spirit, a never-ending process. - Lawrence M. Miller -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org