How to Repair a DEAD Computer

today I've got a repair and diagnostic video featuring an HP computer from one of my clients that has stopped working and I'm sure the fact that it's at HP computer has absolutely nothing at all to do with that now those of you familiar with my channel know that I am no fan of HP I've often said that in the technician world I've shared with you that we say H P stands for horrible products it's kind of an internal thing we text in the industry share with each other although I'm trying to get that information out to the customers this customer of mine has bought several systems for me over the years none of which have required any repairs whereas this HP computer does require a repair from the same customer so that's not for me to brag and tell you how great my custom builds are you're misinterpreting if that's what you concluded no no what I am asserting is that if you build it yourself it'll be better than anything you can buy from specifically HP but probably anything you can buy from anybody one of the questions I'm often asked is will I ever show how to build a laptop and despite how many times I keep answering this question I keep I keep getting it so I'm trying to find a more clever way to answer it so I guess I'm just going to say this if you guys know a place that sells the laptop case motherboard all the stuff that goes together the screen to make a laptop please send me the link and I don't mean to make a specific laptop I want to choice of motherboards I want to choice batteries I'm going to choice of screen sizes I want to choice of cases just like with desktops so if anybody is aware anybody out there in the world watching this video if you are aware of any place that sells laptop parts enough to build your own laptop please send me that link until then please stop asking me if I can build a laptop for you guys so I don't know that sarcastic enough for you but yeah I'll just try to put it out there trying to make it clear and I think I'll just have to remember this part in this video so when I get that question in the future and I will then I'll just point them to this video so I don't have to keep repeating myself so I don't have to keep repeating myself so I don't have to keep repeating myself alright so the customer says this thing doesn't work when I ask the customer what does that mean it doesn't work so okay so what does that mean well it doesn't do anything okay so this is one of the frustrations a technician has with a customer and it's all in how you ask the question what happens when you hit the power button nothing so if I were to hit the power button right now it does the same as when it's all plugged in yes okay got a dead computer it's interesting because in coincidental that my number one most viewed video is how to repair a dead computer that's what it's titled I guess it's a good title so if this title looks familiar to you that's why I'm reading it because a title seemed to work well and that video was shot years ago when I had the SD camera and just using the the in camera microphone so quality is much improved since then and it's time to do an update and I have no idea what's wrong with this computer everything you're about to see is happening on camera as I'm experiencing it for the first time so I'm hoping in the process that you'll understand the frame of mind when take that I'm taking if you should ever have a computer problem that you want to self diagnose or whether it's yours or a friend of yours what's the diagnostic process so the first part is that we have to verify what the problem is I did not verify this when I picked it up from the customer I just picked it up and said I'll deal with it want to take it back to my office so one of the first things I noticed here on the back is they have an Ethernet port here and here now this suggests to me that this is probably a 100 megabit per second port and this is a gigabit port you'll also see they've got a video card down here and I've got a video card here so I'm guessing we're not going to be using any of this stuff because it's probably all disabled except for the usb in the audio everything else you can ignore but at this point I only point that out because that the plug a monitor into it won't do me any good to plug the monitor in here right because I won't get an accurate diagnostic if I'm plugged into a lot a video card that's not so we got to plug in up here I'm not going to use the network ports right now because when you're diagnosing a computer you only want the very basic things plugged in you want to disconnect any printers any USB drives anything that's not necessary for the computer to boot because sometimes computers boot when you unplug one of those things and there's no real diagnostic to be done inside of the computer at that point you've got a bad device or a bad cable or something else is going on so let's verify the problem because customers they don't always tell you the truth and I'm not suggesting that customers purposely lie but I do think that sometimes sometimes they do but sometimes they just simply don't know enough to be able to explain the problem accurately and that's why they've hired you to do it so let's verify it so I've got my monitor out I've got my DVI cable here we're going to plug that in right in my proper should be the proper video card right back here there we go I've got my USB keyboard mouse by now you're all familiar with that we'll plug that in back here and then finally we've got the power cable so let's plug that in and I do get a green light here on the back that tells me that power supply should should be working ok so far so good let me come around and we're going to turn the keyboard on and well it's already turned on good monitors on everything's good we stand off to the side let's hit the power button ah well it does turn on it is not what the customer described so I hear the fans and I think this is probably what the customer is explaining is that nothing happens here so Rydia starting your diagnostic with regards to trick figuring out what's causing this problem well the first thing is don't be too fast don't be impatient I want it while I'm talking I'm actually biding my time just to see if anything will appear on the screen behind me and then once enough time has passed I would say usually 30 seconds to 90 seconds shouldn't take more than 90 seconds on average to to see something then it's safe to assume or to conclude at that point that something is wrong internally that needs repair this is not a software problem because we can't even gotten to the software yet and I need to take a step back to say the first first part after you've asked the customer what's wrong is then to determine if you think that sounds like a software problem or a hardware problem and I'm really difficult problem sometimes you have to just pull the hard drive from the computer or you don't have to pull it physically but pull the cable off of it and hook up a spare hard drive and reinstall the operating system and see if you can replicate the problem if the problem replicates on a fresh install it's probably hardware it's really that simple now during all this yakking that I'm doing nothing is happening here but it is interesting to me that the system does turn on it does power up but that doesn't automatically mean the problems not our power supply I'm going to hold the power button in and see if it'll turn off after about 10 seconds and it does so there's some communication between the motherboard and the power supply that is working now before you work on the inside of a computer it's important you unplug it from power people talk about being grounded but you don't want an earth ground not when you're working on the inside of electronics and earth ground should you have a short will have that electricity flow right through your body and definitely into the earth ground you'll you'll likely sustain a very very very serious injury or death and for that reason I cringe every time somebody says that you should have the computer plugged in and flip the switch on the back of the power supply to off there's a number of problems with that recommendation the first one is clearly this person is no electrical engineer or has any formal academic electrical education and you don't need one to make a youtube video I mean look I'm doing it the second thing is there's no power switch on the back of this power supply I'm pretty sure HP saved about a quarter of a penny by removing it so you know those quarter of a pennies add up and the reason why consumers buy these pieces of junk again my opinion is that they're cheap and the reason they're cheap is because they're built cheap so in this industry you really do get what you pay for there are some PC builders that will make a pretty good profit but they're very niche you know we're talking like Falcon Northwest and you know alien wearing things like that where there's a much more profit margin generally speaking regardless if you buy a $400 computer or a twenty four hundred dollar computer in most cases the mark-up that can be made from that is about 10% the only reason I still build computers it clearly isn't for the money but it's for the it's for the fact that I enjoy it and of course the money comes into Swiss service now computers I build have a one year warranty so I'm not going to make any money on service for a year after I built it so we'll go back to the fact that I enjoy it and I enjoy diagnosing too it's is basically a puzzle solving and exercise and I I guess I like solving puzzles so let's go ahead and open up to the HP but you remember HP does something nobody else does all the screws they use are Torx bits in this case t 15 in many cases t 15 you can remember that if you're ever going to work on an HP computer even just to take the side panel off they don't want you in there because heaven forbid if you saw what was in there and you knew what you were looking at you'd realize you paid too much but anyway let's go ahead and let's take it apart that's gonna be the first thing we've got to do here and we'll start by simply just removing the side panel come on there we go let's see what we're working with well we've got a lot of dust in there first and foremost and the first thing I'm curious about where I'm drawn to are two particular things one is the power supply and two is the video card to me these and my experience are the most likely culprits of what can cause this behavior could also be a motherboard could also be a CPU could also be RAM potentially could be any single component or cable in the system that's causing this so I'm going to start by just looking to see if this fan spins easily with my fingers and it does oftentimes on these video cards you can't turn that fan or it requires some effort and that's all I need to know in this case that fan looks like it's going to spin okay I want to verify that so I'm going to turn this on and we're just going to look and see that all the fans are spinning as they should so with the cover off we're going to plug it back in again the DVI cable will be first and then we save the power cable for last and now I'm going to turn it on and I just want to verify our exhaust fan is turning CPU fan is turning video card fan is turning and I'll look here on the back power supply fan is is turning so that's a good start I don't know if you can tell just you know there's big dust bunnies in here this thing is absolutely filthy looks like we've got two hard drives in here and I that customer really wants the data off the drives they don't really care if this is fixed or not but I I just got to know what it is so first I'm going to hold the power button in make sure it's off pull the cable sometimes there can be residual power in the capacitors on the board so if you hit the power button did you see the fan spin just then even though nothing was attached is like magic where that power come from that power was stored on the capacitors and it will slowly drain out but if you're in a hurry yeah and you go yank that video card out and plug another went in before you've drained those capacitors or given them enough time drain on their own you might see a big spark and well chances are you're going to have to be replacing a motherboard and who knows what else probably a video card to of that I'm very specific with that example you could just wonder why all right so to get the video card out we get another T 15 so to get these cards out HP requires this little retention plate to be taken out and now the video card should just slide right out of there ooh what is it I'm not even sure what it is probably I don't want to know but I'm going to just grab a spare any any PCI Express video card should be fine for diagnostics so I always have a few laying around let me go grab one I'll be right back this is an old Radeon X 1300 it gets 256 Meg's of RAM it's great because there's no fan on it it's completely silent and it's a great test card for me to just slap into any system I know this card works it'll probably work for years and years and years we're going to just put that in place here and the PCI Express slot so you don't want to be too hard on those so it's important to get everything lined up properly before you add the downward force to plug the card in or you could break the slot it's all real easy stuff it's just being aware of what your limit should be with regards to how much force and effort you put into getting Hardware installed I always say never force anything I'm going to plug power in here and turn the video or sorry going to turn the computer back on I just want to see if this makes any difference at all if we get any video and it is not making any difference nothing is happening so just go ahead put power the next thing I want to check is the power supply but before we get ahead of ourselves I want to undo what I've done here I want to put the original video card back in take this one out put this one back in and you'll see these video cards they just run off the PCIe bus power there's no power cord from the power supply like a modern gaming card would have they don't draw that much power the great thing about testing a power supply first of all I don't recommend those power supply testers I think those are a waste of time and a waste of money to me a spare power supply is cheaper and more accurate and faster so let me go grab one so a couple of diagnostic parts I use the most with the PCI Express video cards and power supplies these are the most common things that go wrong on computers and it's very common for people to just automatically assume there's no sense in testing the power supply because the system comes on and I wish I wish being a technician was really that easy but the fact is when you don't know what's wrong you have to test everything you can assume nothing now the only two things I need to pull on the power supply are the motherboard power cables so that's the large 24 pin cable and the smaller CPU power cable down here in the corner that's not blocking your view and then I'm just going to put this in here really quickly I should mention there are some manufacturers that like to use their own proprietary power supplies but you'll find that out soon enough if you work on one because your connectors won't fit so you shouldn't have any worries there let's see this should be CPU power right here and that'll go what's that guy go right down here that's like that okay once again plug the video card back in and we're going to plug power back in and turn it back on that's not gonna work if I don't plug the power into the right power supply you saw that right did you catch it all right all right that's going to go down here make sure the switch is in the off position you don't want to give yourself a shock that would not be fun flip the power switch on now you'll see there's a little green light down here on the bottom of the motherboard that's that's identifying or confirming I'll get that word out that it has power so this is all starting up power supply fans running this is just a 500 watt antec basic brand power supply and it's great again for Diagnostics tech I wouldn't even mind putting this in a system not not what I would sell their customer but I it's just a great power supply so it's good that it has a second life after its first life which was powering a computer for I don't know how many years and now it's kind of retired and it just kind of does this part-time very part-time so this has made no difference whatsoever well now that's interesting the system just turned itself off I didn't do that that's very very interesting so I'm going to unplug this and here's what I know so far I know most likely whatever this problem is is not the video card and it's not the power supply and that's basically the process of diagnosing is that we're figuring out what isn't broken you get it because once we've gone through every single component all we're going to be left with basically if we go all the way down will be the CPU and motherboard combination that'll be all that's left and I very rarely have ever seen a bad CPU and these motherboards are so expensive you purchase them on eBay they ship out of China in most cases you don't know what you're getting with regards to quality they're just it makes more sense to just buy a new computer than to repair these one of the things that I like about them so anyway I just want to try this one more time because I don't like the way the power supply cable was seated and I didn't notice that until I pulled the cable off half the little four pin addition to it just kind of fell off and I expect it to have a little more resistance than that so I just want to make sure it was plugged all the way and it looks like everything is still the same nothing has changed and so what do we do now so I'm going to just pull that we're going to pull this and there and that and we'll just set this down here for right now so I'm just simply going to put this back the way it was since it seems the power supply in fact is fine the video card is fine so what's the next step next step is that we could have a problem with the hard drives or anything plugged into the motherboard so I want to go ahead and unplug these hard drives back here this is a tight squeeze back here there's uh everything there's two drives you can't see the solid state drive behind this apparently we've got a storage drive in a boot drive and this thing's gone through a lot of upgrades you see you see it's got the video card upgrade the network card upgrade and the hard drive upgrade in fact I think even the storage drive was not stocked because this is a Western Digital black and the Western Digital black drives are known for performance anything that's known for performance is going to cost more there's no way this computer shipped with that drive it with a shift probably with the Western Digital blue for cost reasons so I'm guessing that was upgraded as for RAM we've got four sticks of RAM here and that could also be a problem if one of those sticks is bad they could create a situation where the system won't even post and the post of course is the power-on self-test it's the first thing you see every time you boot up any computer I'm also going to disconnect the optical drive for the exact same reason that if the optical drive circuitry in any way has been damaged or it's failed then of course it could prevent the whole system from starting now if I could just get the SATA cable off you can see how tight of a fit that is there are easier ways to do this but I'm just trying to do this quickly for the camera okay now we've disconnected all the drives from the motherboard we don't have any unnecessary components plugged in on the back in fact I'm even going to unplug my keyboard and mouse dongle because I've seen that cause systems not to boot and let me grab my power cable again let's go back up to the power supply and let's try again okay nothing is changing so we know it's not the power supply it's not the video card it is none of the drives or SATA cables you see how I'm working my way down this chain right you're starting to get this or did you get it the first time so it I might say the third time later just to make sure all right so now the question is where do you go from here well we don't need this network card and this network card could be causing the problem so I'm going to pull the network card out and plug the cable back in now you don't have to do it one at a time you could I could have pulled the drives on the network cable and if the system would have booted I simply wouldn't have known which of those things it was only that it was one of those things by doing it one thing at a time when you get a result you know what was that last thing you did however it takes longer so there's no real right or wrong way to do it as long as you get to the proper conclusion at the end of it obviously none of this is making any difference whatsoever so another thing we can try to do is to clear the motherboard BIOS and I'm simply looking on the board to see if we have some sort of a jumper to clear the BIOS and this can happen from time to time where the BIOS just gets corrupted or sometimes a low power situation like a brownout can cause a little spike and then the BIOS gets confused and it causes the corruption and when that happens in most cases you can recover it there's usually a little jumper on the motherboard to clear the BIOS and I'm just looking for that right now and I don't see it but I do see this battery right here and this little battery when they go bad there the thing the battery holds the date and the time it also holds your whole pcs configuration such as what hard drives you've got and things like that and those batteries don't last forever although they typically last for three to seven years in most cases so I'm gonna get a little jeweler's screwdriver we're going to remove that battery and let the motherboard sit let it drain all right I've got my little jeweler's screwdriver here and I'm just going to reach up and push this there's a little lever right above the battery that's holding the battery in place it kind of sits over it I lift that up battery comes out there's our battery now I got to get my battery tester now if you're familiar with my past videos you've seen me use this before it's just a cheap battery tester I bought on eBay I think it came out of China or something just a couple of bucks but it do the job I just want to put the battery down on this and the battery is borderline good so it's not completely dead it could be replaced but it's not completely dead and it's not in the redzone so I would say it's not a battery issue even we can remove that from our list of things that are possible causes for this problem of course we want to verify we obviously that we have no power here with the power switch we want that CMOS or that BIOS I want to confuse you CMOS holds the bias the CMOS is a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor and a BIOS is a basic input/output system but you don't need to know that just they're related so oftentimes when people mention the CMOS or the BIOS sometimes there's even UEFI on the latest a lot of times they're referring to what we're talking about here which I'm referring to as the BIOS I even even if it's UEFI I still call it BIOS but anyway we again you don't need to know any of that unless you want to be a professional technician and it's on a test I've never I'd say I'd ever had a customer ask me but I suppose that's not sure customers have asked and usually when I tell them what it means it doesn't help at all but anyway I'm going to let this sit for a minute make sure the BIOS drains and it will come back and put the battery back in and see what happens alright well hopefully we've given that enough time I would actually in a perfect situation if I had more time and if I wasn't making a video out of this would probably let it sit at least an hour it's only been about five minutes but that really should be enough time with the keyword being should just putting the battery back in it and the bottom of the battery goes in first below the clip and then when you push straight on the top it should just serve should just go in what you did not do it sounded like it did though didn't it let's try it again there we go batteries back in power back on hit the switch let's see if we get anything at all keeping in mind that after a BIOS reset the system could take about 10 to 20 seconds longer to boot the very first time as it has to sort out figure out what hard drive you have and things like that of course you will need to reset your date and time for sure and then any other customizations if you had any and if you don't know then just leave everything else alone and this does not appear to have been made to have made any difference whatsoever so the next thing I would check would be the RAM so I'm going to pull the power you'll see when we wait for the fans to stop and I'm gonna hit that power button again oh good nothing happened and I'm going to pull two sticks of this Ram and there's a blue channel in a black channel and I'm not sure if they're paired up the way they look side-by-side or if they're paired up in systems like you've seen me built where it's opposite oh wait it tells me right up here dim one dim to dim three dim four let's pull out three and four that's going to be these two here on the end and we're going to see if this makes any difference at all you'll see I'm touching the case of touching metal that make sure I'm grounded I'm also as much as possible trying to handle the RAM by the edges but on this Ram holding it by the top of the chips trying to avoid touching anything metal and of course having one hand on the case then I don't have to wear an anti-static strap plug this back in yeah we can turn this back on well something different happened it booted ah it's one of these two it's possible it could also be the socket it's also possible something called chip crawl occurs over time where the chip starts to work its way out of its socket although there are retention levers in here that hold the RAM in place you simply can't trust it so once again pulling power hit the power button make sure all the power is drained we're going to put one RAM module back in it doesn't matter if it comes from the same socket or not I'm simply doing this because this is the old it's going to be easier to plug them in side by side than to try and go in the middle so I'm going to just plug that one Ram module back in and turn the system back on and it appeared well the fans just slowed down it's booting great all right so that means this Ram module is either bad or was not sitting well if it still boots with this Ram module in that means one of the two weren't seated properly and they need it to be receded if I plug this in and it doesn't work this is the problem all right so plug that back in put power back on and here we go we're about to have the answer to this problem in moments it's exciting in that riveting nothing is happening still nothing still nothing you think you think I've waited long enough I think I've waited long enough pull it pull the RAM module back out now this is a 2gig Ram module so that means they must have two four six gigs that they have eight or well the way it says could be interpreted one of two ways it's either part of a 2gig kit which would be there the pair of them equals two gigs I'm going to assume that this is two and that he had a total of two four six eight gigs of RAM which I'm going to guess was also upgraded I don't think the HP came with this but maybe it did but anyway this appears to be our culprit I expect it will boot just fine now or at least you know power-on self-test just fine and then once we hook the drives back up it'll already heard the fans slowed down just now so what was I saying so yeah once we hook all the hard drives back up I'm sure it's going to boot and operate just fine and the customer will be able to get whatever data they want off of it and to then continue to use the computer or retire it as they see fit I would say to retire it because I think they're just going to experience more problems as the computer gets older now with regards to the old memory module I destroy this and the reason I destroy it as I never ever want it to be a problem I have to tighten hosts in the future sometimes when you throw things away people pull them out of the trash and then somehow someway it ends up coming back to me in the future as something I need to fix again so to avoid that I just take these and I break them in half that will never happen and that's it that's going to wrap up this video diagnostic it was really just that simple and now you understand what's going through my head when I'm trying to figure out what's wrong I hope you enjoyed it I hope you learned for from it I hope it empowers you and encourages you to diagnose your own system or a friend's system and to solve that puzzle it's a great feeling when you get the answer and when you get the answer without any help and on your own you know once you've been taught the proper things to look for you no longer are dependent on others you're more self-sustaining and as a result the way you feel when you've accomplished it is beyond words so once again thank you for watching if you enjoyed the video please be sure you click the like button and also please click the subscribe button if you want to be emailed every time I post a new video you'll be the first to know if you've already subscribed and you're not getting those emails check your subscription to me and make sure the little check box for sending emails is checked and that's the whole point of subscribing also if there's any videos you'd like to see be sure and let me know in the comments below and of course any feedback is welcome as long as it's put friendly we're trying to create a community where we all support each other so anybody who feels like they just want to disparage and put people down don't even bother leaving a comment because it's going to get removed but anyway thank you so much for watching I will see you next time and bye for now [Music]

Channel: CareyHolzman

Views: 3,921,961

Rating: 4.6713209 out of 5

Keywords: Carey, Holzman, HP, desktop, computer, pc, personal computer, hewlitt packard, windows, microsoft, ram, memory, cpu, motherboard, dead, how-to, new, replace, replacement, compaq, dell, recover, laptop, fix, diagnose, diagnostic, boot, will not start, will not boot, computer dead, computer repair, computer fix, transfer, upload, rogue one, star wars, back to the future, bttf, carey holzman, tech-vets

Id: Zz9pMKy9Mbs

Length: 37min 4sec (2224 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 13 2016