Ughh... a dead PC

[rockymtnhigh]

Ughh,,, primal computer scream. Wife connected her ipod to her computer last night to charge, she comes home, and the computer is dead. Not sure if the ipod had anything to do with it. It appears to be fine.

Power supply - an Antec 480 - dead as a door-nail. Nice smell too. I went and got a new power supply; and its still dead. She took out the mobo.

I am leaving for Las Vegas in 6 hours, so no time for a rebuild. Had to just give her my kid's machine for the weekend; and will rebuild next week.

Just venting...

 

[dfergie]

I saw this post and thought your laptop died

 

[BigTimMN]

that sucks, but at least the Ipod survived whatever happened... thats probably the most expensive part that could of been damaged.

 

[rockymtnhigh]

that sucks, but at least the Ipod survived whatever happened... thats probably the most expensive part that could of been damaged.

No, it was my old 3G 20GB ipod. Several generations back.

She is not going to have optimal computing for the next several days, that is for sure. My son's Athlon 1800 runs like a dog. An old dog.

 

[Neutron]

Sounds like a great time to upgrade to a Core 2 Duo.

 

[stimpson]

Did you try control-alt-friggen hammer!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[diogen]

Power supply - an Antec 480 - dead as a door-nail.

I had two Antec power supplies die on me in the last month: on a Sonata and NSK 4000.
In the first case it took the hard drive with it. No CPU/RAM/mobo damage in either.

Diogen.

 

[Van]

I really really wish that the power supply manufacturers would put in an inline fuse for the power to the boards and drives, last ps I had that went bad took out the board, video card, sound card, floppy drive and the ram. Strangely enough my stove had an overload on one of the burners and it was shooting sparks out of the element 10 minutes ago.

 

[rockymtnhigh]

I think it also took out her hard drive. I pulled the drive and put it in an external enclosure, wheel is spinning, but the hamster appears to be dead.

Then tried it in the other machine as a slave, the PC recognized it, but windows would not boot with it plugged in as a slave.

Now, I have a spare 250GB drive sitting around, so that won't cost anything, except time, precious time, in the OS rebuild.

How do I find out if the ram is dead? Before I go out and buy a new mobo/cpu, (I am seriously tempted to just get her a Athlon 3200 kit with mobo/cpu for under $100; it uses the same ram that I currently have), with the big move coming up, I really do not want to spend a lot of money on this, but her machine needs to be functional. All she does is word, excel, publisher, outlook, web, and her company's software. Thats it.

I will browse at Fry's to see what they have.

 

[BigTimMN]

ram is cheap, if your going to rebuild, spend a bit more on the Mboard, go cheap on the processor and get new ram.. you can always upgrade the processor later..

of course i see alot of Mboards now have gone to jsut Serial ATA for drives... and that can add to the expense too.

 

[Neutron]

ram is cheap, if your going to rebuild, spend a bit more on the Mboard, go cheap on the processor and get new ram.. you can always upgrade the processor later..

of course i see alot of Mboards now have gone to jsut Serial ATA for drives... and that can add to the expense too.

You can get PATA to SATA adapters.

I had a hard drive do something similar. Got my Vista install done and was copying files over from one hard drive to a newer SATA hard drive. In the middle the drive dies on me.

I got a USB enclosure for it that does both SATA and PATA and noticed the file table (NTFS) somehow went corrupt. Fortunately I found some software to rescue my files off of it.

 

[navychop]

Go to a computer show. There will be somebody there that sells memory and will test yours for free. I agree, more memory, at least up to 2GB, is worth more than a couple of steps up in CPU speed.

BTW- site problem. As I post this, I can see there is a page 2 of replies, but I can't get there. I keep getting redirected to page 1. So maybe there's another poster that gave the same answer, but I just can't get to that page to see.

On edit: As I post this, it appeared on page 2 & I can see the other post made on 2. I guess this is part of the server work Scott has been talking about.

 

[Larry1]

Have a look at the capacitors on the motherboard. If they are bursting or spilling liquid on the motherboard, then maybe just chasnging the capacitors might get it running. I had this happen to my nephews pc about a month ago. His problem was that he needed the data on the hard drives. They were setup as a raid that was built onto the motherboard, so replacing the capacitors was a cheap solution to getting it running again. The major issue with upgrading is that if the pc is of any age old, that there is probably very little parts thet you will want to reuse due to different connections on a new motherboard. New or refurbished pc's can be found very cheap if you do not need a high end machine.
e.g. locally here for me a refurbished machine for $250.00
eMachines W3611 Refurbished Intel Desktop PC - Intel Pentium 4 631 3.0GHz, 512MB DDR2, 160GB HDD, DVD±RW DL, Flash Media Reader, 10100 LAN, Windows Vista Home Basic RB-W3611 in Canada at TigerDirect.ca

 

[rockymtnhigh]

Being at CES, I haven't even had time to look at this thread; and will make my decision on how to proceed on Wednesday, once I am home....

I appreciate all the advice. First, I need to try to recover some of the data from her hard drive. Scott suggested putting the drive in the freezer over night, and then trying to spin it up the next day.

 

[ocnier]

I really really wish that the power supply manufacturers would put in an inline fuse for the power to the boards and drives, last ps I had that went bad took out the board, video card, sound card, floppy drive and the ram. Strangely enough my stove had an overload on one of the burners and it was shooting sparks out of the element 10 minutes ago.

I couldn't agree more! I had a power supply take out 3 drives (one with my entire music collection!). I had to mail a hard to a friend in CRNA school in baltimore to get a copy of most of the old stuff I had. I fu**in learned to back up my crap after that. In fact I got a DROBO for Xmas.

 

[rockymtnhigh]

Well, I decided I did not have the time nor the patience to build a new pc right now. So I shopped around, and found a Dell Inspiron Desktop (2GB Ram, 320GB Hard Drive, Athlon 64 X2 4000+; Vista Premium) with a 19" LCD Display for a little over $600. Price was right, and for what my wife will do, it will be perfect. Plus since I just got her a new monitor last month, I'll get to keep one of the two of them for my desktop.

Still don't like Vista; trying to figure out how to make it see my laptop/other desktop, which are on XP. But its all due to the firewall it comes with. Will probably just dump the windows firewall and dump Norton, and just put AVG on it and be good with it. I don't need a firewall anyway, as I have a hardware one.

 

[rockymtnhigh]

I finally managed to get it to recognize my existing networked machines; had to change the workgroup, and it got much more cooperative. Am in the process of de-Vistafying as much of it as possible.

 

[diogen]

Vista doesn't have any problems seeing XP shares.
It does have problems seeing Samba shares on Linux, but that it fixable.

Diogen.

 

[rockymtnhigh]

Vista doesn't have any problems seeing XP shares.
It does have problems seeing Samba shares on Linux, but that it fixable.

Diogen.

Once I got all the machines on the same workgroup all was fine.

Today's challenge is that my office 2003 disks have disappeared. I have the serial, but no discs. Frustrating; as I need to have this machine up and running for my wife before she comes home tomorrow night.

 

[mike123abc]

Once I got all the machines on the same workgroup all was fine.

Today's challenge is that my office 2003 disks have disappeared. I have the serial, but no discs. Frustrating; as I need to have this machine up and running for my wife before she comes home tomorrow night.

Quick install open office!