As my regular readers know, I've been without a computer at home for three weeks. But the symptoms actually began at least a month earlier - symptoms which I mistakenly attributed to overheating at the time. Well, the nightmare is over. My computer is back up and running as of last night. You won't believe what the problem was, especially after reading the whole story and everything I went through over the past three weeks.
Those early symptoms going back to at least early September? The computer started randomly rebooting itself, much like it would if the operating system crashed. But the weird thing was that there were no errors in the event log, only warnings of applications and services which had not properly shut down when the reboot occurred... well, duh. Still, we chalked it up to overheating and stopped leaving the system on 24/7. This seemed to reduce the frequency of the reboots... at first.
Over the next few weeks, however, the reboots became more frequent again, and then a new symptom showed up. Instead of rebooting, it just shut itself off completely. And then would not turn back on for several minutes. And when I say it wouldn't turn back on, I don't mean that it just wouldn't boot. No, it would not power on at all. Pressing the power button did absolutely nothing, as if it weren't even plugged in. After a while, it finally turned on again. This only happened once or twice until that fateful night three weeks ago when it shut off and stayed off.
At this point, Chris opened it up to check that everything was in place - all of the power connectors, the CPU, heatsink and fans, etc. While he was in there he reset the BIOS. When he attempted to power it on again, it came on! But it only got so far as to boot into Windows, when it promptly blanked the screen and froze solid. Several more attempts produced the same results. We gave up for the time being, planning to look at it again the next day.
That was when things got really weird. The next day it started spontaneously turning itself on. But it would only barely reach the motherboard's POST (power-on self-test) and it would reboot. This had us leaning toward a problem with the power supply, so we went and got a new one. With the new one in, the reboot loop remained, but it no longer spontaneously powered on. So we thought this meant we did indeed have a power supply problem along with something else. What we wouldn't realize until last night when we finally solved the mystery, is that the disappearance of the spontaneous power-ups was just another step in the continuing evolution of the real problem.
We were now thinking the motherboard had gone bad, but before buying a new one, Chris decided to try putting in an older video card we had lying around. Now the motherboard wouldn't even POST - the fans would run but that was it. Not even any beep codes to signal what the problem might be. Chris thought maybe this other video card was no good so he put mine back in, and still no POST.
So we ordered a motherboard, and when it came in I waited eagerly for Chris to install it. The result? Nothing. Still just fans, no sign of "brain" activity. Double-checked all of the connections, no luck. We concluded that it must actually be the CPU that had gone bad. Ordered, waited.
The CPU came in this Tuesday, and Chris actually went home from work early to install it. About fifteen minutes before he was due to pick me up from work, I got a text message: "Not the CPU."
Now, up until now, I had been surprisingly patient with all of this. A few years ago when I didn't work and my computer was literally my life, I'd have slit my wrists by now. This time, though, I was unbelievably calm. I was getting by with my work PC and using Chris' PC at home. I couldn't do all of the things I had wanted to do this month in terms of building online income, but I had confidence that we would get it running soon. Until I got that text message and it seemed all possibilities had been exhausted. Then I started to hyperventilate.
Last night, Chris started hunting the web for answers. It has been a long time since he has had to troubleshoot hardware, since his employer uses Dell computers almost exclusively now and they come with on-site support. So he thought he might be missing something. And that's when he came across this thread on the Asus support forums. The very last post on that thread was from someone who'd had a problem identical to the latest symptom my system was exhibiting: his fans would power on but the motherboard would neither beep nor POST. The cause for him, it turned out, was a reset button that had become stuck and was literally causing the machine to reset non-stop.
The reset button is part of the case. It is a completely non-essential part which can easily be disconnected from the motherboard with no ill effects other than loss of the ability to quickly hard reset the system with one button press. Instead, you have to press the power button twice. When Chris read this forum post out loud to me, I said, "If that's all it is, after everything I've been through..." He laughed and went into the office to try disconnecting the reset button.
I'll be damned if the friggin' thing didn't start right up, and stay up, for about three hours (until I shut it down, myself, to go to bed).
This has been the longest, most drawn-out, most aggravating computer mystery I have ever faced, and I've dealt with a lot of them. And it was a short circuit in the freakin' reset button all along. Each time we would change out a part, and jostle the case around, the wires would move closer and closer together until they were finally in constant contact, causing who knows how many resets per second, giving the appearance that the system was unable to boot. Ten years from now, you will still hear random outbursts from me: "The frickin' reset button!"
Oh, and I'm keeping all those shiny new parts. We're going to build a new system out of the old ones and see if we can sell it to someone who needs a Christmas gift for their child.
![[photo of me]](/glasses144.jpg)
![[album thumbnail]](/photos/flood2010/thumbnails/albumthumb.jpg)
![[album thumbnail]](/photos/oregon2009/thumbnails/albumthumb.jpg)
