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Hardware troubleshooting 101


Slaughter

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This is what it looked like opening a system today. Can you find one hardware problem here?

 

s_CIMG0953.jpg

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My father has used my younger brother's old PC for a while now. He is a walking disaster when it comes to using a PC, and as usual he had messed things up. Being home on vacation, I had to look at it as usual.

 

The old goat said that he had been deleting some files to free space on C: for defrag. The same day the system started rebooting by itself, and the graphics was messed up. Doing some troubleshooting himself, he ended up turning off hardware acceleration and the likes (through tips from Help and support or something). Since then system has worked, but lagged when using Windows games etc.

 

Showing me what he did, he got an error message on the NVidia control panel entering advanced graphics options. I therefore assumed that he had messed it up with deleting files, and thus caused BSODs that causes system reboot. Therefore I uninstalled the old graphics driver, and added the latest. System was unstable with graphical artifacts doing so however, so I decided to check out the card itself and reseat it. Opening up, I found this:

 

s_CIMG0600.jpg s_CIMG0601.jpg

 

As you can see the video card fan is trying to escape. In addition the motherboard fan was not spinning. NVidia chipset on the motherboard and NVidia graphics card...

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Haha, I'm searching for what's wrong in the first picture, and all of a sudden, I think: "Is it just the perspective or is that fan half way out?"

The closeups show it far better, though.

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*pictures Braveheart with a fan instead of Mel Gibson on his knees*

 

"Freedom"

 

Hehe, indeed Azrael :)

 

@Matri: Good question! I guess the fans suck up all the dust. That's what they're there for, right? :)

 

@Gimli: Think of the sound if it has actually shot out of it's socket...

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I've had my share of problems with fans, but nothing quite so extreme. The funny thing was, I took the graphics card back to the shop, and they replaced it with another one with a broken fan. Need I say more?
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