The swap is done, and my computer is acting normally.
The cooler was a bit of a pain, but just about everything else was painless. I was able to start up straight into Windows 8.1, and I’m currently hunting down motherboard drivers.
I did have to phone home to reactivate Windows, and this time, I actually talked to a person. Once I said ‘replaced motherboard’ he gave me the code to reactivate.
Thanks to all for the help! You may now go back to shouting at each other as to whether a sudden outage can harm electronics.
Power restoration means voltages slowly increase as appliances power up. No spikes or significant drops exist. That slowly rising voltage is even ideal for electronics. And potentially harmful to motorized appliances.
How large are spikes from other appliances? Most who entertain fears forget to include numbers. Yes, those spikes may exist - as single digit or as much as a few tens of volts. Near zero. Also called noise. Noise - those spikes - are made irrelevant by superior protection inside all appliances. Superior protection necessary to even make irrelevant much ‘dirtier’ power from a UPS.
Protection inside electronics means noise is actually converted to and consumed as rock solid and stable DC power for semiconductors.
Most failures are due to manufacturing defects. Defects that may have existed for years. A classic example was electrolytic capacitors, made from counterfeit electrolyte, that failed many years later. Another example of what causes most failures - manufacturing defects. More could be said if numbers from that simple tool exist. All we can say is manufacturing defects best explain the OP’s failure.
I’ve been in electronics all my life, but I’ve never heard of “counterfeit electrolyte”. Counterfeit transistors, certainly. Cite?
Electrolytic capacitors will fail (usually by their value dropping dramatically) after many years, but that is due to the electrolyte drying out. That proceeds faster at higher temperatures.
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
A researcher is suspected of having taken the secret chemical composition of a new low-resistance, inexpensive, water-containing electrolyte when moving from Japan to Taiwan. The researcher subsequently tried to imitate this electrolyte formula in Taiwan, to undersell the pricing of the Japanese manufacturers. However, the secret formula had apparently been copied incompletely, and it lacked important proprietary ingredients which were essential to the long-term stability of the capacitors. The bad formulation of electrolyte allowed the unimpeded formation of hydroxide and produced hydrogen gas.
[/QUOTE]
There are links in the article to reports with more detail, though I don’t know how far they get beyond “suspected”.
