I applied the thermal paste per the instructions and put things back together. Now the thing won’t boot. The blue LED on the power switch comes on nice and bright when I push the switch and the little green LED on the motherboard is on as long as it’s plugged in, but nothing else is happening.
There are no beeps, no drive sounds, and none of the fans even come on. What did I do to it? Even if I fucked up the CPU wouldn’t the fans at least come on?
I installed a PCI fan and that just plugs into a standard power connection. It’s not doing anything. It’s like I have power, but I don’t have power.
I removed the heat sink and lifted up the CPU. There was a small speck of something sitting on some of the contacts in the CPU socket. I blew that away, put everything back together, and now it boots into Windows!
Now I’ll have to make sure that the heat problem is solved.
Well, it seems to be running great. The fan is much quieter than before. I installed Speedfan, a temp monitoring program, and according to it the temperature is holding steady.
I was having some weird keyboard problems before that had me considering a new keyboard, but those seem to be gone.
I spoke to soon. Now it’s locking up at random times. I’ll be working on it, surfing the web or whatever when suddenly the screen freezes and it no longer responds to the mouse or the keyboard and I have no choice but to shut the power off and reboot.
No sudden shutdowns or messages about thermal issues, it just freezes and requires a reboot.
And rebooting is now a problem. It won’t always do it. This morning it was giving three beeps (apparently indicating a memory issue) and then just sitting there. After several tries with this result it suddenly booted.
Tonight it locked up on me twice. Both times I had to power down, and both times I had to try booting several times before it succeeded. But this time there were no beeps.
So WTF? It’s a brand new motherboard, so as I see it there’re only a couple of possibilities, the CPU or the RAM. It can’t be the drive because when it fails to boot it doesn’t even get to that point. The three beeps apparently indicate memory issues so I suppose that’s the next thing I’ll replace, although my gut tells me that it’s the CPU.
I got a new keyboard to replace the flaky old one and, just my luck, it’s defective. The left shift key emits a string of “|” characters when I press it. I can’t win lately.
Download and burn a bootable CD of MemTest86+. Run it for at least 24 hours. That will tell you if the memory is flaky.
Prime95 is also a good one, but that will only tell you what you already know: that either the CPU or memory is flaky. Well, there are other possibilities, but you’re right that these are the most likely.
Just a thought, but have you got the heatsink on the right way around? I once cooked a CPU by putting the heatsink back on the wrong way round which left an airgap between the CPU and heatsink.
I could be mistaken but I don’t think it’s possible to have it on wrong.
In any case, I originally had it on without thermal paste. It was definitely heating up then, but the sypmptoms were different. It didn’t lock up, it just suddeny shut off all power without warning and when I rebooted it displayed a message saying that it had been shut down due to a thermal event. It’s not doing that now so I think it’s a different problem.
However, I am open to the possibility that there is still a heat problem, I’d just need to understand why I’m not seeing the same symptoms as before.
The speedfan software I installed shows that the CPU temp mostly hovers around 55% C, Occasionally going into the mid 60s. I’m having difficulty finding any specs as to what an acceptable range is.
The System Properties dialog says that it has an “Intel Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.20GHz”.
Speedfan currently shows:
LIST]
[li]GPU:59C[/li][li]CPU: 54C[/li][li]Local: 33C[/li][li]Remote 2: 49C[/li][li]HDD: 34C[/li][/LIST]
My editing time ran out before I could fix that mess at the bottom of that post.
Speedfan currently shows:
[ul][li]GPU: 59C[]CPU: 54C[]Local: 33C[]Remote 2: 49C[]HDD: 34C[/ul][/li]
I’m not sure what some of the things on that list are.
Since I am not a neat freak and I also think a computer case is a terrible thing to spend $$$ on as they are so unnecessary, I have a solution that causes my computers to never over heat…
Then it would seem the CPU is not your problem nor is heat a problem with the CPU (you fixed that).
Your problem is probably with the memory.
Take your memory sticks out and re-seat them. Be sure they are firmly in and locked down (there is a clip on both sides that when fully engaged means the memory is seated appropriately). Make sure they are in the right banks on the mobo (many mobos have the memory divided into banks, make sure they are arranged correctly).
Check your BIOS. There are various settings in there about memory. Usually the BIOS auto-detects the memory and has the proper settings but it may have something wrong. Check your manual and look at the settings and compare to what memory you have (there are a lot of timing settings and such…if you do not know then don’t mess with it). You may be able to reset the BIOS to defaults though which can help. Again, if you are unsure of what you are looking at in there then leave it alone.
Update your BIOS. Check the manufacturer website and get the latest/greatest BIOS. Be careful when updating BIOS…it is not hard but you can brick your mobo (permanently disable it) if the update fails (e.g. the power goes out partway through the update…fortunately the update occurs quickly).
Yea, I’m suspecting the memory also. I did have one or two memory error messages that I had attributed to the heat issue. Plus, at one point it was giving 3 beeps when it wouldn’t boot, which supposedly indicates memory problems on intel boards.
The mobo is brand new. Of course that doesn’t guarantee that it’s up to date. I’ll check the BIOS version.
What I don’t get is that I can lock it up by surfing the web for a couple of hours, but apparently not by running Prime95. I wonder what the difference is?
