Memory and/or power supply, motherboard battery problems may also give some
of the symptoms you are experiencing.  Is it possible to replace with known
good parts?

-----Original Message-----
From: PCBUILD - Personal Computer Hardware discussion List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Tom Bitsky, Jr
Sent: Thursday, October 07, 2004 8:39 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [PCBUILD] Suspect bad Motherboard

Hello! This is my first post, so I apologize if I break any rules.

Two days ago a customer dropped of his personal computer. This is a
customer I do programming for, but he asked if I could take a look at his
computer and verify that his video card had gone bad. He claimed that, for
the past few months, his video card would simply die while he was working
and he would need to restart. The restarts became more and more frequent
until a few days ago, when the card wouldn't work at all.

Like the customer, I could not get his video card to work (an unlabeled AGP
card, probably 4x). I had a spare AGP card, and ATI Rage PRO, so dropped it
in his computer and the display popped right up. No problems, so he came
back, watched the computer work, and then took it home happily.

That night, I got a call at 10:00 at home. The customer could not get the
display to work even though he had seen it work at my office. Could his
monitor be the cause of the problem? I told him to bring both the monitor
and the computer back to my office.

When he brought it back, the video card was indeed not working. I pulled it
out of the slot, put it back in, and it worked fine. Then, out of
curiosity, I put the original card back in. It also worked fine for 15
minutes, then suddenly died out.

So I put back in the ATI card, booted up the computer, but when Windows 98
started up, the keyboard and mouse would die. The keyboard and mouse worked
fine in safe mode, however, so I figured it was a problem with the display
driver. I rebooted several times, and finally the keyboard and mouse worked
in Normal mode (I don't know why). I downloaded the ATI driver, put it in
the CDRom drive, and went to My Computer.

No CD-Rom drive. None in safe mode, either.

I called the customer and confirmed his CDRom drive had been working fine.
I hadn't changed the bios, and the bios did see the CDRom drive attached to
the computer.

I needed to get actual work done, so I tabled the issue until this morning.

Today, when I went to start up the computer, the display wasn't working
again. I pulled it out and put it back in a few times, and got the display
to work again. However, now the computer won't even boot. When it goes to
the hard drive, it says that the media is invalid. I had a Windows 98
startup disk, so I put it in the floppy and rebooted the computer. The
computer booted from floppy find and came up to the A:\> prompt, but now
the keyboard is locked up again

My feeling is that such a myriad of problems is indicative of a bad
motherboard, possibly damaged when the original video card began fritzing
out. That's what I plan to tell the customer (I'm only doing a favor for
this guy, I'm not a computer repair shop), but I didn't want to just tell
him to buy a new computer and then read somewhere that there was an obvious
solution.

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks!
Tom Junior


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