My Geek-Fu is strong.
Ξ August 12th, 2006 | → 1 Comments | ∇ Life |
My motherboard has been flakey as heck lately, what with random shutdowns. Was kind of mystified by it all until I started having problems with my USB. It was then that I figured out I was having power problems.
Pulled the power connector off the motherboard. Hm…doesn’t want to come out…Gr…ah, there we go. Ah, now I see why! It’s all melty. Just on the +5V lines.
Crap, can’t do anything about it right now. Let’s just jam it back on there…hope it holds on a bit longer.
Lasted maybe a month, then the restarts and USB problems started again. Ah, nuts.
Kept reseating it. The uptime kept getting smaller and smaller. Finally it would be up maybe a couple minutes. If I was lucky. It would even reboot on the BIOS screen.
“Crap,” said I. “This won’t do.” friend of mine, Paul, sold me a board a couple years back. Pop it in. Haven’t hooked up the drives yet. It fires right up. “Cool,” says I. I turn the computer off, turn away, then turn back. The computer is back on. “Huh?” I exclaim, as I smell it: magic blue smoke. NO!
I have no idea what happened. Suck. The board is dead. Now I’m down two boards.
So on Friday my co-worker Andy finds an old HP on the side of the road. Old old, like 333MHz or something. I ask that if it’s DOA can I have the motherboard so I can rape it for the ATX connector. He says sure.
Cracks it open…no hard drive. “Heck,” says he. “I’m not going to bother with this. You want it, it’s yours.” Hands me the motherboard, and proceeds to rape the case of all screws and fans.
I start to unsolder the ATX connector. It’s *slow* going. “Want a hint?” says Cool Guy, pulling out his propane torch. Why not? Not like we’re going to use this board again, anyway!
Connector comes off in about six seconds. We proceed to burn the heck out of the board and pull everything off it. Fun!
So tonight, with great trepadation I take my precious and carefully remove the old connector. I could care less about the connector itself, but unsoldering all 24 pins cleanly is proving a real bitch. Finally I realize I’ll never be able to remove all the old solder without putting on *more* solder. Once I do that, it pops right off.
Solder on the new connector. It’s thru-hole soldering, which means that not only are connections made on both sides of the board, they’re made *inside* it as well.
I finish, so I install it in the case. Don’t hook *anything* up. It’s either going to work the first time, it won’t work at all, or it’ll release more magic blue smoke.
Plug it in…whoops…forgot to turn off the power supply…but wait…motherboard light is glowing…that’s a good sign.
Fire it up…hey, it’s working! Go into the BIOS and check voltage levels. Everything was *very* low before, esp. +5V. Now everything is 5×5. SWEET.
Typing on it now. Have Asus PC Probe running, taking polls of the system every five seconds, so if it hiccups I’ll know about it.
While I was at it, the CPU fan had quit a while back. It was fine when I hooked it to another one of the fan plugs, so I knew it wasn’t the fan itself.
Examined the surrounding circuitry…hm…there’s an electrolytic cap right in it’s path. I know I’ve got replacements, let’s give it a shot.
Crap, I hate thru-hole soldering. I can clearly see one pad just fine. The other side has none on either side. Hope this works…
Hey, my fan is spinning! Full speed! All right!
*pats himself on the back*
