How to Repair a DEAD Computer

today I have a video of

repair

ing and diagnosing an HP

computer

from one of my clients that stopped working and I'm sure the fact that it's an HP

computer

has absolutely nothing to do with it, now those of you who are familiar with my channel you know that I am not a fan of HP. I've often said that in the technical world that I've shared with you we say that HP means horrible products, it's kind of an internal thing, uh, we, Tex, in the industry, we share with each other. Although I'm trying to get that information out to customers, this customer of mine has purchased several systems from me over the years, none of which have required

repair

, while this HP computer does require a repair from the same customer, so which is not for I want to brag and tell you how cool my custom build is.

You're misunderstanding if that's what you concluded. No, no, what I'm stating is that if you build it yourself, it will be better than anything you can buy specifically from HP, but probably. anything you can buy from anyone, one of the questions I often get asked is: will I ever show how to build a laptop? And despite how many times I keep answering this question, I keep getting it, so I'm trying to find a smarter way to answer it, so I guess I'll just say that if you know of a place that sells Thea's motherboard the laptop case, everything that goes along with the screen to make a laptop, send me the link and I won't do it.

I'm not talking about making a specific laptop I want to choose between motherboards I want to choose batteries I want to choose screen sizes I want to choose cases just like with desktops, so if anyone knows, someone in the world is watching this video yes Do you know of any place that sells enough laptop parts to build your own laptop? Send me that link until then. Stop asking me if I can build a laptop for you. Okay, so I don't know, that's sarcastic enough for you, but. uh you know try to lay it out trying to make it clear and I think I'm going to have to remember this part of this video so when I get that question in the future I'll just point them out. this video so I don't have to keep repeating myself so I don't have to keep repeating myself so I don't have to keep repeating myself right so the client says this doesn't work so when I ask the client what does that mean?

It doesn't work that well. So what does that mean? Well, it doesn't do anything right. This is one of the frustrations a technician has with a customer and it all depends on how you ask the question. What happens when I press the power button, nothing, so if I were to press the power button right now, it does the same thing as when it's all plugged in, yeah, okay, I have a

dead

computer, it's interesting because, and it's coincidental, my number one most viewed video is how to fix a

dead

computer that's what it's titled I guess it's a good title so if this title sounds familiar to you that's why I'm reusing it because that title seemed to work well and that video was filmed years ago when I had the SD camera and just using the microphone on the camera, so the quality has improved a lot since then and it's time to do an upgrade and I have no idea what's wrong with this computer, all you're about of seeing is happening on camera as I'm experiencing it for the first time, so I hope that in the process you understand the frame of mind I'm taking if you ever have a computer problem that you want to self-diagnose or whether it's yours or someone else's. your friend.

What is the diagnostic process? So the first part is that we have to check what the problem is. I didn't check this one. I picked this up from the client. I just picked it up and said I'll deal with it when I pick it up. to my office, so one of the first things I noticed here on the back is that they have an Ethernet port here and here now this suggests to me that this is probably a 100 megabits per second port and this is a gigabit port, too you'll see They have a video card down here and they have a video card here, so I guess we're not going to use any of this because everything is probably disabled except USB and audio, everything else.

I can ignore it, but at this point I'm just pointing it out because I have to connect a monitor. It won't do me any good to connect the monitor here because I won't get an accurate diagnosis if I'm connected. a mod, a video card that is not enabled, so we have to plug it in here. I'm not going to use the network ports right now because when you're diagnosing a computer you only want to connect the very basic things and you want to disconnect any printers, any USB drives, anything that's not necessary for the computer to boot because sometimes the Computers boot up when you unplug one of those things and there is no real diagnosis to be done inside the computer, at that point you have a faulty device or a cable or something else is happening, so let's check the problem because customers don't always tell the true and I'm not suggesting that clients lie on purpose, but I think that sometimes, sometimes they do, but sometimes they just don't.

I don't know enough to be able to explain the problem accurately and that's why they hired you to do it, so let's check it out so I can get my monitor out. I've got my DVI cable here, let's plug it in. on the right, in the right place, there should be the right video card, back here, here we go. I already have my USB keyboard and mouse, everyone is already familiar with that, we're going to plug it in back here and finally we have the power cable, so we're going to plug it in and a green light appears here on the back telling me that the power supply It should be working fine so far, so good, let me come in and let's turn on the keyboard and oh. it's already on, good monitor, everything is fine, we stand aside, let's press the power button, well, it turns on, it's not what the customer described, so I listen to the fans and I think this is probably what the client is explaining. that nothing is happening here, so where do you start in your diagnosis regarding Tri?

Find out what is causing this problem. Well, the first thing is don't be too fast, don't be impatient. I want well, I'm talking, I'm actually. I'm biding my time just to see if something appears on the screen behind me and then once enough time has passed I would say normally 30 to 90 seconds it shouldn't take more than 90 seconds on average to see something so it's It's safe to assume or conclude at that point that something is wrong internally and needs fixing, this is not a software issue because we can't even access the software yet and I need to take a step back to say the first part after you've When I asked the client what's up, we need to determine if you think that sounds like a software problem or a hardware problem and a really difficult problem.

Sometimes you just have to take the hard drive out of the computer or you don't have to physically take it out, but remove the cable and plug in a spare hard drive and reinstall the operating system and see if you can replicate the problem. If the problem replicates on a new installation, it is probably hardware. It's really that simple now that I'm talking about so many comments. Nothing happens here, but it's interesting to me that the system turns on, turns on, but that doesn't automatically mean the problem isn't our power supply. I'm going to hold down the power button and see if it works. it turns off after about 10 seconds and does it.

There is some communication between the motherboard and the power supply that is working now. Before working inside a computer, it is important that you disconnect it from the power source. People talk about being grounded, but you're not. you want a ground connection, not when you're working on the inside of electronics, a ground connection, if you have a short circuit, that electricity will flow directly through your body and definitely into the ground connection, you're likely to hold a very , very very very. serious injury or death and for that reason I cringe every time someone says you have to have your computer plugged in and turn off the switch on the back of the power supply.

There are a number of problems with that recommendation. The first is clearly this one. The person is not an electrical engineer or has formal academic electrical education and does not need one to make a YouTube video. I mean, look, I'm doing it. The second thing is that there is no power switch on the back of this power supply. I'm pretty sure HP saved about a quarter cent by eliminating it, so you know those quarter cents add up and the reason consumers buy these pieces of crap again. My opinion is that they are cheap and the reason why they are cheap. it's because they're built cheaply so in this industry you really do get what you pay for there are some PC manufacturers that will make pretty good profits but they're very niche you know we're talking like Falcon Northwest and you know. alien wear and things like that where there's a much larger profit margin generally speaking, regardless of whether you buy a $400 computer or a $2,400 computer, in most cases the profit margin you can make on that is about the 10%, the only reason I still build computers, is clearly not because of the money, but because of the fact that I enjoy it and of course the money comes with the service.

Now the computers I build have a one year warranty, so I won't make any money off the service. a year after I built it, we come back to the fact that I enjoy it and I also enjoy diagnosing. This is basically a puzzle solving exercise and I think I like solving puzzles so let's go ahead and open up HP, but remember HP does? something that no one else does, all the screws they use are Torx bits in this case, um, T15, in many cases T15, you have to remember that if you are ever going to work on an HP computer, even if it's just to remove the side panel, They do not do it.

I want you there because God forbid, if you saw what was there and knew what you were looking at you would realize you paid too much, but anyway let's go ahead and take it apart that will be the first thing we have. I have to do here and we'll start by just removing the side panel. Come on, let's see what we're working with. Well, first of all we have a lot of dust there and the first thing I'm doing. I'm curious where I'm drawn to two things in particular, one is the power supply and the other is the video card.

In my experience, these are the most likely culprits of what can cause this behavior. It could also be a motherboard. It could also be a CPU. It could also be Ram, it could potentially be any component or cable in the system that is causing this, so I'll start by looking to see if this fan spins easily with my fingers and many times it does on these video cards. I don't turn on that fan or it takes some effort and that's all I need to know. In this case, it seems that that fan is going to spin fine.

I want to check that so I'm going to turn this on and we're just going to look and you'll see that all the fans are spinning like they should so with the cover off we're going to plug it back in the DVI cable will be first and then we save the power cable for last and now I'm going to turn it on and I just want to check that our exhaust fan is spinning. The CPU fan is spinning. The video card fan is spinning. I'll look here at the back of the power supply. The power supply fan is spinning so that's a good start.

I don't know if it is possible. Tell me, you know there are big dust lints in here, this is absolutely filthy, it looks like we have two hard drives here and I, the customer, really want the data on the disks, they don't care if this is fixed or not, but I only have I need to know what it is, so first I'm going to hold down the power button to make sure it's off. Pull the cable. Sometimes there can be residual power in the capacitors on the board, so if you press the power button, did you see the fan spinning at that moment even though nothing was connected, it's like magic, where that power comes from, that energy was stored in the capacitors and will slowly deplete, but if you're in a hurry, you pull out that video card and plug in another one. one before draining those Capa capacitors or giving them enough time to drain on their own, you might see a big spark and, well, you'll probably have to replace a motherboard and who knows what else, probably a video. card too, if I'm being very specific with that example, you might be wondering why, okay, to get the video card out we have another T15, so to get these cards out HP requires this little retaining plate to be removed and now the video .

The card should just slide out of there. What is it? I'm not even sure what it is. I probably don't want to know, but I'll grab a spare. AnyPCI Express video card should be fine for diagnostics. I always have some lying around, let me go get one. I'll be right back. This is an old Radeon x1300. I think it has 256 megabytes of RAM. It's great because it's fanless, completely silent, and makes a great test card. so you can insert it into any system. I know this card works. It will probably work for years and years and years.

We're going to implement that here and PCI Express slots which you don't want to be too harsh on. Those, so it's important to align everything correctly before adding downward force to plug the card in or you could break the slot. This is all very easy, just be aware of what your limit should be regarding how. a lot of strength and effort you put into installing the hardware. I always say never force anything. Now I'm going to plug the power in here and we'll turn on the video or I'm sorry we can turn the computer back on, I just want to see if this makes any difference, if we get some video and it doesn't make any difference that's okay so move on and disconnect the power.

The next thing I want to check is the power supply, but Before we get ahead of ourselves I want to undo what I've done here and I want to put the original video card back in, take this one out, plug it back in and you'll see these video cards just running outside the PCI. ebus power there is no power cable from the power supply like a modern game card would have, they don't draw as much power. Best thing about testing a power supply first. I don't recommend those power supply testers. I think they are a It's a waste of time and money for me, a replacement power supply is cheaper, more accurate and faster, so let me buy one, so a couple of diagnostic parts that I use more often would be PCI Express video cards and power supplies, these are the most common things that go wrong in computers and it is very common for people to automatically assume that there is no point in testing the power supply because the system turns on and you wish it would be technical it was really that easy, but the fact is that when I don't know what's going on, you have to test everything, you can't assume anything now, the only two things I need to connect to the power supply are the power cables from the board base, so that's the big 24-pin cable and the smaller CPU power cable here in the corner.

If that doesn't block your view, then I'm going to put this here real quick. I should mention that there are some manufacturers that like to use their own proprietary power supplies, but you'll soon find out if you work on one. Because your connectors don't fit, so you shouldn't worry. Let's see, this should be CPU power here and that will go. Where will he go? Down here just like that. Okay, once again, plug in the video card. Plug it back in and we're going to plug the power back in and turn it back on. That's not going to work if I don't connect the power to the correct power source.

You saw it well, did you understand it correctly? Okay, that's going Low here, make sure the switch is in the off position. You don't want to give yourself a shock that wouldn't be fun. Turn on the switch. Now you'll see that there's a little green light here at the bottom of the motherboard. identifying or conf confirming I'll get the word out that it has power so all of this is turning on the power supply fans running this is just a basic Rand antec 500 watt power supply and um it's great again for Diagnostics Hell, I wouldn't even care.

Putting this in a system wouldn't sell it to a customer, but it's just a great power supply, so it's nice that it has a second life after its first life, which was powering a computer for I don't know how many years. and now he's kind of retired and just doing this part time, very part time, so this hasn't made any difference, well that's interesting, the system just shut down. I didn't do that, that's very, very interesting, so I'm going to pull the plug on this and this is what I know so far. I know the problem is most likely not the video card or the power supply and that's basically the diagnostic process - we're figuring out what's not broken.

You get it because once we've gone through each component, basically all we're left with, if we go all the way down, is the CPU and motherboard combination, the only thing left and I've very rarely done that. I have seen a bad CPU and these motherboards are so expensive that you buy them on eBay, they ship from China in most cases, you don't know what you are getting quality wise, it just makes more sense to buy a new computer. I have to repair these, one of the things I don't like about them, so anyway, I just want to try this one more time because I don't like the way the power cord was placed and I didn't realize that until I took the cable out halfway and the little four pin addition just fell out and I'm hoping it has a little more resistance than that so I just want to make sure it's fully plugged in, it looks like everything is fine.

It remains the same, nothing has changed and so what do we do now? So I'm going to know what I'm going to do, that we're going to do this and that and that and we'll just put this in writing. here for now, so I'm just going to leave this as it was since it looks like the power supply is indeed fine, the video card is fine, so what's the next step? The next step was that we might have a problem with the hard drives or anything connected to the motherboard, so I want to go ahead and disconnect these hard drives back here this is very tight here there is a there we go there are two drives you can't see the solid state drive behind this apparently we are I have a storage drive and a boot drive and this thing has been through a lot of upgrades.

See, you see, it has the video card upgrade, the network card upgrade, and the hard drive upgrade. In fact, I think even the storage drive was not available because This is a black Western Digital and black Western Digital drives are known for their performance. Anything that is known for its performance will cost more. There is no way this computer will ship with that unit; it probably would have shipped with a blue Western Digital for cost reasons so I'm guessing it was upgraded since for Ram we have four RAM drives here and that could also be a problem if one of those drives is bad it could create a situation where which the system won't even post and posting Of course, the power-on self-test is the first thing you see every time you turn on any computer.

I will also disconnect the optical drive for exactly the same reason as if the optical drive circuitry has somehow become damaged or failed. so of course you could prevent the whole system from booting now if you could remove the Sata cable. You can see how tight it is. There are easier ways to do this, but I'm just trying to do it quickly for the first time. camera ok, now we have disconnected all the drives from the motherboard, we don't have any unnecessary components connected to the back, in fact I'm even going to disconnect my keyboard into the mouse dongle because I've seen that makes the systems not work . boot up and let me go grab my power cord again let's go back to the power supply and try again okay nothing is changing so we know it's not the power supply it's not the video card and none of the SATA drives or cables you have. look how I'm going down this chain, you're starting to understand this or you understood it the first time, so, and I might say it a third time later just to make sure everything's okay, so now the question is.

Where do you go from here? Well, we don't need this network card and this network card could be causing the problem, so I'm going to take out the network card and we'll plug the cable back in. Now you don't have to. one at a time I could have taken out the drives and the network cable and if the system had booted I just wouldn't have known which one of those things it was just that it was one of those things making it one thing. at one point you get a result you know it was the last thing you did however it takes longer so there is no right or wrong way to do it as long as you come to the right conclusion in the end obviously nothing from this. is making any difference so another thing we can try to do is clear the BIOS on the motherboard and I'm just looking at the board to see if we have some kind of jumper to clear the BIOS and this can happen from time to time. where the BIOS just gets corrupted or sometimes a low power situation like a power drop can cause a small spike and then the BIOS gets confused and causes corruption and when that happens in most cases, you can get it back, usually there's a little jumper on the motherboard to clear the BIOS and I'm looking for that right now and I don't see it, but I do see this battery here and this little battery, when they go bad, they're what the battery holds. date and time, it also contains all the settings on your PC, like what hard drives you have and things like that, and those batteries don't last forever, although they typically last 3 to seven years in most cases, so I'm going to Get a small Jeweler's screwdriver, let's remove the battery and let the motherboard sit, let it drain well.

I've got my little Jeweler screwdriver here and I'm just going to reach over and push this in, there's a little lever right on top. The battery that holds the battery in place sits on top of it. I lift that battery and it comes out. There's our battery. Now I have to get my battery tester. If you're familiar with my previous videos, you've seen me use this before. It's just a cheap battery tester I bought on eBay. I think it came from China or something, just a couple of dollars, but it will do the job. I just want to leave the battery on this one and the battery is borderline good so it's not completely dead it could be replaced but it's not completely dead and it's not in the Red Zone so I would say it's not a battery problem, we can eliminate it from our list of things that are possible causes of this problem, of course we want to. to check, obviously, we don't have power here, we have a power switch, we want that seos or that bios.

I don't want to confuse you, the seos contains the BIOS, the seos is a complementary metal oxide semiconductor and the bios is a basic input and output. system, but you don't need to know that they are simply related. Many times when people mention SEO or BIOS, sometimes there is even ufi in the latest version, many times they are referring to what we are talking about. about here, what I refer to as BIOS, even if it's UEFI, I still call it BIOS, but anyway, again, you don't need to know any of that unless you want to be a professional technician and you're in a test.

I would never say a client asked me, but I guess that's not true, clients have asked me and usually when I tell them what it means, it doesn't help at all, but anyway, I'm going to let this sit. for a minute, make sure the biovoltage is straining and then we'll go back and put the battery back in and see what happens. Well, I hope we gave it enough time. Actually, I'd be in a perfect situation if I had more. time and if I wasn't making a video out of this I would probably let it sit for at least an hour, it's only been about 5 minutes but it really should be enough time with the keyword should I just put the battery back in. and the bottom of the drum goes in first under the clip and then when you press directly on the top it should just go in which didn't sound like it did but doesn't it?

Let's try again there. we turn the battery back on, press the switch, let's see if we get anything, keeping in mind that after resetting the BIOS, the system might take 10-20 seconds longer to boot the first time as it has to resolve the figure. find out what hard drive you have and stuff like that, of course you'll need to reset your date and time for sure and then any other customizations if you have them, and if you don't know just leave everything else alone and this won't show up. have been made to have made any difference, so the next thing I would check would be the ram, so I'm going to pull the stem, you see.

I want to wait for the fans to stop and I'm going to hit. that power button again, oh well nothing happened and I'm going to take out two drives of this RAM and there's a blue channel and a black channel and I'm not sure if they're paired like they look side by side or if they're paired uh in systems like the ones you've seen me built where it's opposite oh wait, it tells me up here dim 1 dim two dim 3 dim four well, let's get three and four, which will be these two here at the end and let's see if this does some difference, you'll see.

I'm touching the casing. I am touching the metal that ensures I am grounded. I'm also trying to handle the ramas far as possible. around the edges, but on this Ram holding it by the top of the chips trying to avoid touching anything metal and of course having one hand on the case, then I don't have to use an anti-static strap to plug it back in and back on. turn this on, oh something different happened, it booted up, aha, it's one of these two, it's possible it could also be the socket, it's also possible that over time something called chip tracking happens where the chip starts to come out of its socket Although there are retaining levers that hold the RAM in place, you simply can't rely on it, so once again, press the power button and make sure all power is drained.

We're going to put a RAM module back in that doesn't matter if it comes from the same socket or not, I'm just doing this because it's going to be easier to plug them in next to each other than to try to go in the middle, so I'm just going to plug that in. Put a RAM module back in and turn on the system again and it seems like the fans just slowed down, it is booting up fine, that means this RAM module is bad or it was not good if it still boots with this RAM module on that sense. one of the two was not seated correctly and needed to be backed up if I plug it in and it doesn't work this is the problem so plug it back in turn it back on and here we go we are about to have the answer to this problem in moments it is exciting isn't it exciting? nothing happens yet nothing yet nothing what to do Do you think do you think I've waited long enough?

I think I've waited long enough. take it out, take out the RAM module now, this is a 2 gig RAM module, which means they must have two, four, six gigs, did they have eight or okay? the way it says could be interpreted in two ways: it's part of a 2 gig kit, which would mean the pair equals 2 gigs. I'm going to assume it's two and it had a total of two, four, 6.8 gigs of RAM that I assume were also upgraded. I don't think HP came with this, but maybe it did, but either way this seems to be our culprit.

I hope it starts well now or at least you know. Turn on the self test really good and then once we plug the drives back in, I already heard the fans slow down a moment ago, so what were you saying? Yes, once we reconnect all the hard drives I'm sure. It will boot up and run fine and the customer will be able to get all the data they want from it and then continue using the computer or retire it as they see fit. I would say remove it because I think we are simply going to experience more problems as the computer ages relative to the old memory module.

I destroy it and the reason I destroy it is that I never want it to be a problem that I have to diagnose in the future, sometimes when you throw. Things get taken away, people take them out of the trash, and then somehow it ends up coming back to me in the future as something I need to fix again. So to avoid that, I just take these and break them in half, which will never happen. That's all we'll conclude this video diagnosis with. It was that simple and now you understand what goes through my head when I try to figure out what's wrong.

I hope you enjoyed. I hope you learned from him. I hope it helps you. you and encourages you to diagnose your own system or a friend's system and solve that puzzle. It's a great feeling when you get the answer and when you get the answer without any help and on your own, you know once you've been taught the right thing. The things you need to pursue are no longer dependent on others, you are more self-sufficient and as a result the way you feel when you achieve it is beyond words, so once again, thanks for watching, if you enjoyed the video , make sure and click the Like button and also click the Subscribe button if you want to receive an email every time I post a new video, you will be the first to know if you have already subscribed and are not receiving those emails, check your subscription. to me and make sure the little checkbox to send emails is checked and that's the point of subscribing too, if there are any videos you would like to see be sure to let me know in the comments below and of course any video. comments are welcome as long as they are friendly, we are trying to create a community where we all support each other, so anyone who feels like they just want to put people down and put them down, don't even bother leaving a comment because it's going to stop be deleted, but anyway thank you very much for watching.

See you next time and goodbye for now.