While I was out Thursday, our maids were cleaning in my office, vacuuming, and moving things around. After knocking my keyboard and mouse cables out, they plugged them back in, but crossed them into the wrong sockets.
When I returned, I found my keyboard and mouse both unable to wake up the computer. So I tried to reboot. The PC wouldn't respond to holding down the power button for 7 seconds... what I usually do if the PC freezes up. So I switched off power in the back and turned it back on, finally causing the PC to begin the rebooting process. Windows began to load, but froze part way in. I attempted a safe boot, but this too froze up.
I tried installing my hard drive in an old Dell computer, but Vista wouldn't boot there, telling me I needed to run recovery from the original OS disc. After several minutes of this, it told me it couldn't recover anything.
So I installed this hard drive as a secondary drive on an XP system. Here, I was able to view the drive just fine, and ran Spinrite to see if the drive was failing in some way. After running in recovery mode overnight, Spinrite reported that there were no problems with the drive.
Back in its original case, I attempted to boot the system, and it loaded the desktop, but after running the processor at 100% for about 30 seconds, it froze up again. I'm thinking it's a heat-related problem since it went further booting from a cold machine... but after warming up, it still failed. I removed the processor's fan and applied new thermal grease, but the failure still occurs.
Could the maids' plugging my keyboard and mouse in wrong have shorted out the motherboard? Could plugging in a vacuum close by have caused a fatal power surge? I have the equipment in a UPS, but if they also plugged into the UPS, a surge could have occurred inside of the protection, therefore reaching the computer.
I picked up a new power supply, jumping from 300W up to 450W, to see if it just needed a little more juice. That didn't solve the problem. I don't think it's an OS problem because sometimes, it won't even power up unless I wait a bit. That seems like a heat related problem, not a total failure. This is occurring even before the computer starts loading the OS.
I've ordered a new barebones kit with a new motherboard, processor, memory, and video card. I've also picked up a new SATA hard drive, and will use Seagate's disk wizard utility to clone my existing drive onto the new one. If that works, then I'll have my primary system up and running later in the week. Will it work to clone the drive and use it with new hardware? Or will Vista fuss about the change of a motherboard? Will it deactivate itself? I'd rather not reinstall everything if it can be avoided, but will do so if I must.
Then, I'll experiment to see what it takes to get the old one going again later. If a new processor doesn't do it, I may just scrap the computer, along with its video card and memory, which are incompatible with the new system.
Category: Technology
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