My niece and nephew had their computer totally fry! What could have caused it?
Dust and Carpet FRESH!! Yes, Carpet fresh – (in fact, this was the 5th computer this year I’ve seen have the power supply totally burn up due to CARPRET FRESH! It has enough “GRIT” to it that it will freeze up your hard drive and you’ll know it when you clean out the dust as it smell like carpet fresh!)
In the case of my niece and nephew – not only was the Power Supply gone – but the heat fried everything on the motherboard except for their hard drive so I was able to save all of their music, pictures, etc – which would have been a huge loss as that machine had about 4-5 years of their stuff – even going back to when they were playing with TOYS and not driving cars! So how does on fix the problem? They really needed to be able to boot to that original hard drive to recapture the data. Plus they really didn’t want to get a brand new computer as they would have preferred to get a laptop. So what’s the solution? Build one a new one for WAY less than a manufactured one!
Can you build your own computer? YES!!! It’s easy and extremely inexpensive! And in less that 30 minutes!
The last one I built was a dedicated MASTERING MACHINE for our downtown studio…the motherboard had to have gone bad as the machine just keep recycling on boot up. Everything was tested on a separate set of parts and it came down to the motherboard. Unfortunately that meant a new power supply, RAM, Processor, etc. unless you want to try to buy legacy hardware and that will cost way more than you’d expect. Luckily we already had a full tower case ($30-$40) – but as stated, the Motherboard was fried – DUST and STATIC are the biggest enemy so that must have been the problem.
Be that as it may, you can go to Tiger Direct, New Egg or other companies and buy a bare bones kit – such as motherboard, processor, processor fan, RAM, and perhaps a new power supply depending on the voltage and the number of PINS to match the motherboard. Move the risers on the case to match the motherboard and install it. Pop in the PROCESSOR (gently as this is ZERO FORCE insertion) along with ‘thermal paste” – (you can buy this separately), pop on the CPU Fan, and then hook up the power supply to all places on the motherboard and to your peripherals such as internal drives (hard drives, CD or DVD ROMS or RW’s) and then power it up – if your original drive is in good shape you won’t have much problem at all – just load the new drivers and you’re back to where you need to be! A simple and cheap solution!
SM/MSO - AAA Computers
