Bad Motherboard or Bad Processor

We worked on a Dell Dimension the other day. It was originally an onsite call. The customer said that it was powering off automatically, and just not working. They couldn't tell me much more.

When I first arrived it was actually up and working inside the O.S., but it was very sluggish, and ended up locking up hard and needed to be hard reset. Afterwards I opened it up and cleaned the dust out of the inside of the computer. It was terribly clogged with dust on all vents and the heatsink. (More than likely overheated). After cleaning the computer I decided to run a hardware diagnostic. It would not finish the tests. ... it kept locking up at different points of the test. First during the CPU, then it passed on the CPU and locked up on the PCI test... then it would lock up on the RAM test. So I began switching out components for 'known good' components, and still was unable to get it to cooperate. Sometimes it would not even POST... it would power on, but sound like a Cesna plane taking off... the fan would keep revving up faster and faster until I would unplug the power cord from the power supply. ( It sounded like the fan was going to explode because it was going so fast!) This is seeming more and more like either the motherboard or the processor.

I ended up taking it back to the shop where I could swap out parts and see what the problem was. After swapping out Power supply, Ram, and taking out all the PCI cards... it still was just revving up the fans, and no video. At this point I was pretty sure it was the processor or motherboard, but I actually had another socket 775 processor to test. I put the "working" processor in, and it still did not work. I took it back out, and put it back in the working system and it did the exact same thing!

So It ended up that the motherboard and processor was bad in this system. The bad motherboard fried my good processor... which sucks!

I bought them a new motherboard...specific for the dell model... and it ended up coming in D.O.A. (Dead on arrival). They ended up just having me spec them up a new pc and installing it in the place of this dang dell! Why are Dells so proprietary? View the next blog for this rant!