HP/ASUS P4SD-LA - Strange problem...

Hi - I have a customer with a HP Pavillion a262N Tower, with an ASUS P4SD-LA Motherboard & 2.8Ghz HT 478 CPU. This particular motherboard has no on-board video, so an AGP video card is being used.

The original problem was that the motherboard powers on, fans all turn on (at high-speed), see 1 or 2 blips of the hard drive light, CD/DVD drives power on, but there is No video & no further boot activity. The fans keep running full-speed and nothing else happens.

I opened the case and found it to be quite dirty, so I unplugged all devices, and cleaned all the dust/dirt out - this included removing the heatsink/fan assembly, which was pretty dirty, blocking proper air-flow through the heatsink.

After some fiddling (pluggin in this, unplugging that), nothing seemed to work. I finally just reassembled all components and the thing booted up fine - in fact, it was running fine for a couple of days . Then, after trying to burn a CD and getting an XP error message, the PC locked up. I did a hard power-off, then powered-on...No video again and the fans full-speed.

I unplugged all devices, let it sit overnight, reassembled, and it booted just fine once again. After running it for several more hours, I returned it to my customer, where it powered right up and ran fine for another day or 2 without issue. Customer went to use it this morning, and back to square one - no video, fans on full-speed, no boot attempt. This thing seems to only want to run for about 2 days, then it does the same stuff all over again. I have not replaced any parts as of yet, I did use HP System Recovery after getting too many strange errors and conflicts (now I wonder if they are all related somehow?).

My experience tells me that the CPU is suspect - just when the cpu is supposed to kick-in and boot the PC, it just hangs there. I also need to consider that the heatsink was originally partially blocked with dirt, causing the cpu to possibly overheat. It doesn't seem to be any one device, either, as any combination of unplugged/plugged devices yields the same result when it is acting silly. The customer did indicate that they have been experiencing strange errors with the system not recognizing scanner, can't burn CDs, error messages, etc. I confirmed that Best-Buy had worked on it at one point, adding a D-link LAN card because the on-board Ethernet failed (?). Perhaps the motherboard itself is failing?

I would just like some advice on this one - I have had many strange occurrences with HP systems, and this one appears to be no different. I would like an opinion on wether to just swap the 2.8Ghz CPU, or should I order a motherboard as well? I don't have either part on hand, so I'd like to order the right part(s) the first time...PLEASE, if anyone has an opinion, please let me know asap. Thanks in advance for any reassurrance

 

CPUs are surprisingly resilient and fail much more rarely than do motherboards. Did you try different RAM? A different PSU? I'm sure if you had an extra compatible CPU laying around you would have tried it. Diagnosing PCs without extra parts can be tough (or expensive if you need to buy parts just to diagnose with ). Over the years, I've compiled quite a collection of CPUs, RAM, PSU's, hard drives/optical drives and motherboards that I know to be good just for using for diagnostics. Thrift stores and garage sales are great places to pick up cheap, functional hardware. I recently picked up a socket 775 3ghz PC for only $20! The owners thought it was DOA because it didn't turn on. It was just the power supply and I got a 160gb SATA hard drive, a DVDRW, the CPU and a gig of DDR2 and the motherboard for $20!!!! (plus the XP Pro COA on the case ) I told them I could fix it for cheap, but they said they already bought another PC and were going to throw the "dead" one away if it didn't sell in the yard sale. Like I said- it's a great way to pick up cheap parts....