The dead home desktop problem returns

Raymond Chen

The computer I bought not a year and a half ago decided to keel over last week. When I push the power button, the power light goes on, the drives spin up, but there is nothing out the video card and not even a reassuring beep from the power-on self test. I’ve disconnected all the external peripherals as well as all the IDE devices, and no change. The problem might be a fried motherboard connection or something. I’m not a hardware person, so I’m not sure how to diagnose it. This is easily the shortest life for a computer I’ve owned (not counting the ones that were dead on arrival). I feel kind of bad buying a replacement for a computer that’s barely fifteen months old, but I also can’t think of what else I can do. All the stuff I can easily swap out I think I’ve already swapped out. And I don’t know if I can find a new power supply or motherboard that fits the custom case. So it’s back down to Fry’s to buy some random bottom-feeder computer just so I can whack my hard drives into it and get back in business. But man, is that machine going to inherit a lot of memory!

(Then again, maybe my problem is that I keep buying bottom-feeder computers?)

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