Didn't Have To Buy A New PC After All

My PC had been giving me trouble of late. Once booted, it ran fine. However, it was taking longer and longer to post once the power button was pressed. I suspected everything from a bad power supply to a faulty switch to a burned up capacitor somewhere on the motherboard.

I really didn't want to buy a new PC just yet. My 3½ year old quad-core HP (w/ 8GB of DDR2 RAM) is still in the middle range of PC performance. In fact, if I was to replace the stock NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT graphics card with something a bit more robust, it could be pressed into service as a low end gaming rig. As is, it handles my browsers (FF4, sometimes with 50 tabs open), business software and occasional video rendering quite nicely. Toward the end of the year, I'd like to replace it with 6 or 8 core system. However, the increasingly unreliable boot up of this one had me thinking that I might have to buy another system, now, that wouldn't be much of an improvement over the current one.


Since the prices of power supplies are so low nowadays (I bought a 600w ATX PSU for $30) I decided to gamble on a new one. If the booting problems were to disappear following the installation of a new PSU, then I'd know that was the problem. If not, I would have had to buy another computer and eat the $30 cost of the PSU.


The actual installation was a bit of a pain in the ass. My desktop PC case is one of those tiny proprietary pieces of crap that aren't designed  with easy upgrades in mind. For one thing, the panel behind the motherboard is riveted in! Moreover, the interior of the case is so cramped and full drives and useless bays (i.e. an HP proprietary media bay for a portable hard-drive-like-thing that cost more than a external hard drive many times its size) that I had to remove most of the components in order to be able to remove the various power connections to the motherboard... not to mention being able to remove the old power supply.


I've built and upgraded enough PCs over the decades that I took the necessary precaution of labeling every single wire and taking close-up pictures with my phone along the way. It is a truly sickening feeling to realize that you have no idea where a errant wire is suppose to go.  HP doesn't offer a detailed schematic of the motherboard. They, of course, don't want their customers to repair their old computers.


I'm happy to report that my hunch was correct. When I reassembled the computer, including the new 600 watt power supply, and reattached all of the cables in the back of the case: power, 1 DVI, 1 HDMI, audio out and a slough of USB cables, it booted immediately. I was a bit shocked... and perhaps the slightly bit disappointed that I didn't have to do any trouble shooting like in the old days.


FYI, to anyone faced with a similar issue. Don't be afraid to get in there and hack around inside your desktops. Just make sure that you have disconnected the power, physically, and then press the power button so as to discharge any stored voltage.