windows desktop pc died

When it rains, it pours. A few weeks ago I purchased the newly released Apple 5k Retina iMac. It would be my first Mac and the $2499 starting price cannot be beat. I was unlucky and the new iMac was sent back to Apple for a replacement.

Just this past Friday afternoon I was working on my win 7 desktop which I built a few years ago. I was watching the webcam and suddenly the video froze. I thought it would just a momentary pause because the kernel was temporarily indisposed. I waited and nop, the video did not resume. Not just that the mouse and the keyboard did not respond. Checking the Num Lock toggle and it is clear the system had hung.

I reached down to press the reset button and to my surprise the reset button had no effect. Very odd. I knew the reset button is a hard-wired reset to the chip set. Not good, I thought. Must be a catastrophic failure.

Only the day before I noticed a fan in the chassis made some unusual noise. It was not louder than the  normal fan noise (there are 5 fans in the system and the cumulative noise is not bad for such high performance system). The abnormal noise I heard is just that the tonal change as if a bearing is on the last leg. I didn't think much of it, as sometime the access pattern of a hard drive may also make similar sound.

We with the system hung on Friday I knew there is a lot more to that. I conducted a few simple tests and confirmed the system is as dead as door nail. While the system power supply would turn on clearly there is no POST. I thought given the symptom the likely problem is:

1. system power supply failure
2. main processor failure
3. main processor power supply failure
4. one of the many regulators on the mother board failed

i have been building my own desktop PC a long time; the reasons including being able to recycle some hardware, and more important a good chassis is very hard to find; in case you wonder about the black DVD drive - i could not find a beige color any more in recent years (and this is one reason I decide to switch to Mac)

the motherboard that i built the system with a few years ago

Before diving in the debugging with both feet, I knew I need to be careful. Assuming the problem is associates with power delivery I need first of all to protect other system components from damage, if they have not already. The most crucial in decrease order of less important:

1. the three hard disk drives
2. the main processor
3. the DDR3 DIMMs
4. the nVidia graphics card
5. DVD R/W drive

It is a very bad timing that my desktop PC die right now as there are a number of things I am working on. While I have many other PCs and notebook this is the system that I do heavy lifting work. If it turn out the motherboard is damaged, I would have to spend a lot of time rebuilding the Windows 7 operation system and the boot disk image. I am not looking forward to that at all.