Diagnosis of a Bad Motherboard!

I hate telling someone that their motherboard is the problem, but sometimes it happens. For me personally it is hard to accept. I have spent many hours on a $20 diagnostic trying everything possible to bring a system back to life.... only to finally give in and tell the customer they need a new motherboard and most likely a new processor and RAM to fit that motherboard. From my experience, motherboard damage can be as small as the onboard video needing to be replaced with a video card to as major as bulged capacitors leaking residue on to the motherboard and it not powering on at all.

To determine a bad motherboard I follow a basic procedure of taking a part out at a time and powering on the system after each part is removed.

Test and Replace the Power Supply if necessary
Then Remove any PCI cards from their slots one at a time.
Remove video card / Use onboard VGA (or use another known good vga card)
Then disconnect the cd rom and dvd drives one at a time.
Then disconnect the hard drive(s) one at a time.
Remove a stick of RAM (Memory) one at a time.
Remove all RAM from the system (do you hear a beep code?)
Reseat the processor, replace with a known good working one if necessary.

If you are down to just the motherboard, a known good processor, a known good power supply and a known good video source and you still cannot get the computer to POST (or even power on at all) than you have a bad motherboard.