The tale of the HP Pavilion

Last Friday, my in-laws neighbour Alexa called my wife and complained that she was having some problems with her desktop computer. The were stripes across the screen, so she couldn't see anything, and she asked Jenn if we could take a look at it. Jenn promised her that we should look into it, and Alexa dropped the computer off at out house later that evening.

In the back of my mind, I thought that this sounded like either a bad monitor, and bad cable, or worst case: a graphics card gone bad. So I decided to make an attempt, and felt pretty confident that I could fix this. The computer had both a ATI Radeon AGP card and an onboard VGA. 1st test revealed a really bad picture, so the ATI card got taken out. The second test, with the monitor connected to the onboard VGA showed a perfect picture. To make sure it was a card issue and not the AGP interface, I tested with a similar ATI Radeon card we had lying around. That gave a perfect picture too, so this was pretty obvious: The ATI card had gone bad.

While the computer was running anyway, I ran some other checks and tuneups, just to be nice. After a while I noticed that Windows had an update ready, and surprisingly this was XP SP3. For some reason this computer hadn't had this update done yet, so I let it start. The update made the CPU run high, and I could hear the CPU fan come on at full blast. It ran like this for almost 20 mins, then I suddenly smelled burned plastic. I got a bit confused, and while I was trying to locate where the smell came from, the computer shut down. In the middle of the SP3 install. Ouch..

I soon found that the smell came from the power supply, and it was so hot that I couldn't touch it. I also found that the cooling fan inside the supply was stuck, so the reason for the fault was obvious. I opened up the power supply and put a new fan in, but the power supply never came to life anymore. The fan had probably been stuck for a while, but I put more stress to the system with high temperature, fans running, power consumption etc. than had been done for a while. I had never had a computer shut down in the middle of a SP3 update process before, so I wasn't even sure if the OS would work at all after that. How inconvenient.. How do you explain to someone that their computer only had a minor issue, easy to fix, until I tried to fix it. Then it broke, and now you need to reinstall your OS and all your applications.

After some thinking, I took the power supply out of one of our spare computers and plugged it on. The HP computer ran POST, and I was very relieved to see the Windows XP screen. XP apparently sensed that the update had been aborted, and ran a roll back process that took quite a while. After one more reboot, XP was fine, and I could do the SP3 update all over again.

I was very relieved about this, and could happily make a phonecall to the owner and describe what was wrong, and tell that I needed to buy a new power supply to make the computer work properly again. When I mentioned the supply failure, the 0wner said that the computer had shut down a couple of times because it was "too hot". So the supply had overheated before as well, but apparently I killed it for good. A new and identical power supply was bought at RJM, and I fitted it in the computer. The owner was happy to be able to keep her computer one more year, and I was happy to have gotten a new experience.