Death and Rebirth or Saga of a System
by TechNudge Guest Pundit, Rick R.
Boop… that’s how it started. Wednesday morning, I heard the sound while I went to shave my neck, but came out and… nothing on the monitor. Hmmm, okay. Reset button.. single white cursor, then nothing else. Unplugged the machine, opened it, looked. All the fans spun, but no POST boop noise. Aggggggh! Reseated the memory and cards, nothing.
Came home early from work with a new motherboard battery, no luck. So, I had to accept it. My computer had passed from this plane of existence. A techie friend of mine who fixes computers for a living said it was either the video card or motherboard. I think I know what happened, but have no proof, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
My first thought was to replace the chip, figuring an older chip would be cheap. The old system? An ASUS K8N, Athlon 64 3400+, and an AGP GeForce 7800 GS. So I figured a new Socket 754 chip (or even 939 chip) and motherboard with an AGP interface would be the way to go. So I went to Fry’s in Burbank. On their in-store processor board, a 3000+ Socket 754 for $10. Cool! So I went to ask for it. “No, we might have that in Palo Alto.” Uh, then why mention it in Burbank? Something about corporate requires it. They think it looks good or something. Ugh.
I looked at motherboards, mostly ASUS since I’ve been using them for almost 10 years and mainly to good effect. No Socket 754 boards, and nothing AGP. But there is a M2A-VM board, with integrated Radeon X1250 graphics, built in Ethernet (like my old one), 4 SATA connectors.. hmm, and $74. Not a bad price.
That means my 1.5 gigs of memory and the video card are now useless, but I’ve been meaning to upgrade, and with the AM2 chips being reasonably cheap, I decide that is time to make the plunge.
The Athlon 64 AM2 4400+ is on the board at Fry’s for $64. Cool! Oh, they don’t have that one either. Discouraged by the lack of actual product in the store, I go to the local PC Club store. They have similar parts, the same motherboard, and figure about $220 for a price on 1 GB of memory, a 4600 chip and the M2A-VM board. They don’t have Socket 754 chips, but their repair tech tells me to look at the motherboard I have and see if the capacitors have done a Jiffy Pop. I thanked him for the advice, decide to call it a night, and think it over. I go home and check the motherboard, and the capacitors look fine. No swelling.
The next morning, on break, I check online from work through pricewatch.com. Turns out Socket 754 chips are available, but at prices starting around $75 unless I go the e-bay route. For that price, I could get a current chip. Oh, and there’s very little in the way of motherboards that are AGP and DDR compatible, and again, they cost as much as modern boards, so I decide as much as it hurts, I can continue upgrading later. But I decide my budget is about $200, and I don’t want to go above that.
Looking around, I tentatively decide on a Brisbane Athlon X2 AM2 4400+ for $83, a 1 GB Kingston 6400 memory chip for $48, and the ASUS M2N-VM motherboard with nVidia 7050 onboard video for $77, which would be a grand total of $208. I asked Bill O’Brien his opinion, and the next morning (Friday), before I start work, his e-mail said it sounded good, and that he had recently built a similar system. But, he suggests I spend a bit more for the 4800+ X2, and reassured me that Intel is great for video, but it does cost more for equal speeds.
Then I see the Fry’s ad. ECS motherboard and 4800 chip for $118. Woohoo. And 2 gigs OCX memory for $75 with a $25 rebate. This might work…
Huh? As much as I am bagging on Fry’s, why would I still shop there? Because, overall, they have liberal return policies, and there is something to be said about not having to return things via mail. Oh, and of course, there is also something to be said for instant gratification. So Friday afternoon, I go and look at everything. The ECS board has no integrated video, and I’m only going to buy a real PCIe card once later, so that struck down that deal. I look again at the M2A-VM board, and some other ASUS boards that have HD options, but I decided that A) my monitor is not high def, and B) I will be looking at video cards later, so I decide to save my money and stick with that motherboard. And so I don’t feel completely dumb if PC Club has a deal going, I go there to check it out. The ASUS board is out of stock, the 4800 chip is nearly $200 by itself, and the people who helped me on Wednesday act as if they have never seen me before, so I go back to Fry’s.
The 4800 chip is $103, compared to $98 at Newegg, and I can have it now, so cool. So I’m at $173. The memory is $40 for 1 gig OCX with a $15 rebate, so while the $75 and $25 rebate is tempting, a budget is a budget, so that’s the new system.
Go to the counter… “Sorry sir, we are out of..” I can glare with the best of 'em, I guess. The clerk takes an involuntary step backwards. “Look, I’m not mad at you personally, but I am mad right now,” I tell him. He’s still on the phone with inventory. For those of you uninitiated with Fry’s, for loss prevention, anything valuable is kept in a large walk-in storage area at the registers, half a store away from the components desk. “So what do you have?” “What do you have,” he asks, “What? Oh, good. They just got some in --I mean just this moment. Truck just arrived.” “Good.” We write up the deal, I get my printout, and go checkout.
Head home, pull the old motherboard, plug in the new one, and while trying to get the DVD burner to fit, (there’s a chassis fan connector on the top front of the new motherboard), that’s when I discover what I think was the problem. I have an Antec 1650BK case, which has a nice black plastic cover on the front. Pulling that cover off, I discover the front fan grill has a dust bunny on it perfectly sized to fit and block the front intake grill. The past few months, I had been having heat issues with the CPU. Yes, I take compressed air to the case every few months, but I must admit this is one area I had not checked. So I think the 3400+ chip died from heat stress.
Put everything together, cable it up, and it’s time for what an old friend of mine called the “smoke test.” (If the computer smokes, it failed the test.) Everything fires up, get the ASUS boot logo, and it hangs. GRRRRRRRRRR! Here I am thinking, not again. So I go to sleep. Hour later, I wake up, decide to pull the DVD burner off the IDE cable, and Boop! The computer fires right up. Windows doesn’t complain really, just says I have to re-activate.
It is at this point I remember to check the IDE jumpers. The K8N didn’t care about Master/Slave on the IDE channel, but maybe this motherboard does. So I stick on the jumpers (yes, how retro!) and it fires up, finding the DVD burner, so at this point I can load drivers. With those loaded, the Internet comes online, and my computer is working again. At this point I can sleep fine.
Next morning, using the ASUS Probe software, it confirms that the power is strong and clear on all rails, so this is good. Then I cleared out the old motherboard drivers, updated the drivers off the net for video and the chipsets, updated the BIOS, and it is running fine. Just need to get more memory and a new video card, but that’s for another time. My brother is taking the memory chips and the video card off my hands, so I will use that towards the video card in a few weeks.
Boop… that’s how it started. Wednesday morning, I heard the sound while I went to shave my neck, but came out and… nothing on the monitor. Hmmm, okay. Reset button.. single white cursor, then nothing else. Unplugged the machine, opened it, looked. All the fans spun, but no POST boop noise. Aggggggh! Reseated the memory and cards, nothing.
Came home early from work with a new motherboard battery, no luck. So, I had to accept it. My computer had passed from this plane of existence. A techie friend of mine who fixes computers for a living said it was either the video card or motherboard. I think I know what happened, but have no proof, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
My first thought was to replace the chip, figuring an older chip would be cheap. The old system? An ASUS K8N, Athlon 64 3400+, and an AGP GeForce 7800 GS. So I figured a new Socket 754 chip (or even 939 chip) and motherboard with an AGP interface would be the way to go. So I went to Fry’s in Burbank. On their in-store processor board, a 3000+ Socket 754 for $10. Cool! So I went to ask for it. “No, we might have that in Palo Alto.” Uh, then why mention it in Burbank? Something about corporate requires it. They think it looks good or something. Ugh.
I looked at motherboards, mostly ASUS since I’ve been using them for almost 10 years and mainly to good effect. No Socket 754 boards, and nothing AGP. But there is a M2A-VM board, with integrated Radeon X1250 graphics, built in Ethernet (like my old one), 4 SATA connectors.. hmm, and $74. Not a bad price.
That means my 1.5 gigs of memory and the video card are now useless, but I’ve been meaning to upgrade, and with the AM2 chips being reasonably cheap, I decide that is time to make the plunge.
The Athlon 64 AM2 4400+ is on the board at Fry’s for $64. Cool! Oh, they don’t have that one either. Discouraged by the lack of actual product in the store, I go to the local PC Club store. They have similar parts, the same motherboard, and figure about $220 for a price on 1 GB of memory, a 4600 chip and the M2A-VM board. They don’t have Socket 754 chips, but their repair tech tells me to look at the motherboard I have and see if the capacitors have done a Jiffy Pop. I thanked him for the advice, decide to call it a night, and think it over. I go home and check the motherboard, and the capacitors look fine. No swelling.
The next morning, on break, I check online from work through pricewatch.com. Turns out Socket 754 chips are available, but at prices starting around $75 unless I go the e-bay route. For that price, I could get a current chip. Oh, and there’s very little in the way of motherboards that are AGP and DDR compatible, and again, they cost as much as modern boards, so I decide as much as it hurts, I can continue upgrading later. But I decide my budget is about $200, and I don’t want to go above that.
Looking around, I tentatively decide on a Brisbane Athlon X2 AM2 4400+ for $83, a 1 GB Kingston 6400 memory chip for $48, and the ASUS M2N-VM motherboard with nVidia 7050 onboard video for $77, which would be a grand total of $208. I asked Bill O’Brien his opinion, and the next morning (Friday), before I start work, his e-mail said it sounded good, and that he had recently built a similar system. But, he suggests I spend a bit more for the 4800+ X2, and reassured me that Intel is great for video, but it does cost more for equal speeds.
Then I see the Fry’s ad. ECS motherboard and 4800 chip for $118. Woohoo. And 2 gigs OCX memory for $75 with a $25 rebate. This might work…
Huh? As much as I am bagging on Fry’s, why would I still shop there? Because, overall, they have liberal return policies, and there is something to be said about not having to return things via mail. Oh, and of course, there is also something to be said for instant gratification. So Friday afternoon, I go and look at everything. The ECS board has no integrated video, and I’m only going to buy a real PCIe card once later, so that struck down that deal. I look again at the M2A-VM board, and some other ASUS boards that have HD options, but I decided that A) my monitor is not high def, and B) I will be looking at video cards later, so I decide to save my money and stick with that motherboard. And so I don’t feel completely dumb if PC Club has a deal going, I go there to check it out. The ASUS board is out of stock, the 4800 chip is nearly $200 by itself, and the people who helped me on Wednesday act as if they have never seen me before, so I go back to Fry’s.
The 4800 chip is $103, compared to $98 at Newegg, and I can have it now, so cool. So I’m at $173. The memory is $40 for 1 gig OCX with a $15 rebate, so while the $75 and $25 rebate is tempting, a budget is a budget, so that’s the new system.
Go to the counter… “Sorry sir, we are out of..” I can glare with the best of 'em, I guess. The clerk takes an involuntary step backwards. “Look, I’m not mad at you personally, but I am mad right now,” I tell him. He’s still on the phone with inventory. For those of you uninitiated with Fry’s, for loss prevention, anything valuable is kept in a large walk-in storage area at the registers, half a store away from the components desk. “So what do you have?” “What do you have,” he asks, “What? Oh, good. They just got some in --I mean just this moment. Truck just arrived.” “Good.” We write up the deal, I get my printout, and go checkout.
Head home, pull the old motherboard, plug in the new one, and while trying to get the DVD burner to fit, (there’s a chassis fan connector on the top front of the new motherboard), that’s when I discover what I think was the problem. I have an Antec 1650BK case, which has a nice black plastic cover on the front. Pulling that cover off, I discover the front fan grill has a dust bunny on it perfectly sized to fit and block the front intake grill. The past few months, I had been having heat issues with the CPU. Yes, I take compressed air to the case every few months, but I must admit this is one area I had not checked. So I think the 3400+ chip died from heat stress.
Put everything together, cable it up, and it’s time for what an old friend of mine called the “smoke test.” (If the computer smokes, it failed the test.) Everything fires up, get the ASUS boot logo, and it hangs. GRRRRRRRRRR! Here I am thinking, not again. So I go to sleep. Hour later, I wake up, decide to pull the DVD burner off the IDE cable, and Boop! The computer fires right up. Windows doesn’t complain really, just says I have to re-activate.
It is at this point I remember to check the IDE jumpers. The K8N didn’t care about Master/Slave on the IDE channel, but maybe this motherboard does. So I stick on the jumpers (yes, how retro!) and it fires up, finding the DVD burner, so at this point I can load drivers. With those loaded, the Internet comes online, and my computer is working again. At this point I can sleep fine.
Next morning, using the ASUS Probe software, it confirms that the power is strong and clear on all rails, so this is good. Then I cleared out the old motherboard drivers, updated the drivers off the net for video and the chipsets, updated the BIOS, and it is running fine. Just need to get more memory and a new video card, but that’s for another time. My brother is taking the memory chips and the video card off my hands, so I will use that towards the video card in a few weeks.
posted by Bill at 12:37 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home