Acer TC885 - Not booting most of the time, but eventually will

[nlinecomputers]

I will never be carrying a huge assortment of adapters, either. There are times of transition where I might have a few, but at this point HDMI has become the de facto standard for new equipment. If someone's getting a new tower (or laptop) and a new monitor I have no reason to believe that anything other than HDMI will be the cable requirement.

I'd add DisplayPort to the mix. Both Lenovo and Dell have several business grade machines with ONLY DP no HDMI. And the monitors have not caught up so a mismatch of HDMI only monitor and DP only PC is likely.

 

[nlinecomputers]

So, based on details, here is what I would check:

1. Cursory test of PSU
2. Check thermal paste to see if right dried out
3. Check SSD health - Older 128GB, if within 10-20G of full, performance could go right to crap, and can be a lot of writes to one area too, causing more wear issues. Make backup of drive, then do some drive speed tests. If SSD seems to be in good health and good speeds, might be time to put image back in place. SSD technologies like TRIM and wear levelling didn't seem to be 100% effective on old drives.
4. Boot from external media - Any better boot times? (Boot to some WinPE too)
5. Look for signs of overclocking/tinkering - Reset to defaults and re-enable XMP/AMP if was used originally (Acer, unlikely)
6. If you can get to boot, check for signs of OS tinkering, improper shutdowns, system interrupts and Event Viewer for hints
7. Update drivers, or even try a driver rollback - I find once Acer gets a buggered driver, you will have issues forever w/o a rollback
8. Memtest86 it for a few passes/overnight
9. Test motherboard - I know this is "impossible" to test properly, and in field not going to happen
10. Nuke & Pave and see if better

Most common causes of this problem in my experiences, in order of how often it is the reason:

1. PSU
2. OS buggered (Nuke & Pave or Dig & Pray)
3. Dried out thermal paste
4. SSD (Clone and restore, or clone to new drive)
5. Motherboard
6. Memory (I put this here, even though it is around 1 in 100-ish chance unless garbage memory... Possible with most OEMs)

(I give both lists based on ease of testing for first list, and commonality of failure on second list)

14 years, I have not seen 1 dead CPU that hasn't been end user- or another store-caused issue; Memory I'm LUCKY to see a dead DIMM once or twice a year, and 14 years, 2 which have been in warranty (MOST of which are within prebuilt by large OEMs and still outside warranty)

The only CPU I have found that failed that wasn't mishandled was killed by the PSU. My fault list is probably identical to yours.

 

[britechguy]

By the way, since someone revived this topic, a "now, the rest of the story," continuation . . .

I did get the new computer set up after the monitor power supply and appropriate cabling were obtained. The customer did not want the old machine, gave it to me, and told me to dispose of it. I couldn't bring myself to, literally, dispose of it so I decided to wipe the hard drive completely clean and then clean install Windows 11 just for fun. That Acer TC885 has been happily running on the desk in my basement ever since. Most of its life is serving as a daytime music player for Jack, my blue and gold macaw, who lives down there. But whatever the problem was, it appears to have been owner induced, and since he rushed to judgment and got another machine, tossing this one, his loss was my gain. It was also the first (and still only) Windows 11 "from the factory" machine that I have at my immediate disposal.

The HP Envy laptop from 2014, with the i7-4th gen processor, is another similar story, but it was literally coming apart at the seems after several years of being used on the road in school settings. When told to dispose of that I undertook a personal "reconstruction" project just for my own personal amusement. The thing still runs just fine, and it's now a "Windows 11 on unsupported hardware" experiment box.