Voodoo repair

[Styxbound]

Doubtless this is a pretty much useless post_why I'm putting it here_ but since it involves the kind of thing I trip out on, going to post it anyway in case there's another moni-maniac out there.

Yesterday someone gave me an old Micro-pc with a 1gig Athlon. Usually I just scrap these but this one had a couple of bad caps and I'm tired of lcds for today, so decided to give it a shot.

Replaced the caps, fired it up, got fans. no post. Tried the whole range of rational things 3 or 4 times. Tried the whole range of semi-rational things 3 or four times. Okay, must be cpu. The closest I had was an Athlon 2400. Went through all of the above again. Zilch.

Put the original back. Cleared the bios. Hit the button and BINGO! Voodoo at it's best. That's what keeps me in the business.

 

[jenrobe]

I can imagine how you feel - often the easiest solution is the best one. Once I did a similar repair, did two hours of fumbling, tried everything that came to my mind and then I tried with the original hard drive again and it worked. You can't explain such things, probably "voodoo" is the right description for it.

 

[Styxbound]

Voodoo

I've seen this with both sound and video a few times. If they belong to me I'll keep these no-posts around for months and months occasionally pulling then out for another whack. Eventually succeeds enough to keep me at it. I suspect a great many boards are tossed which could be saved, but of course not worth the effort from a practical standpoint. With so many the fix is totally unpredictable and makes no sense at all from anything I know.

But it's Man vs Machine at it's finest and a hell of a lot of fun.