dead motherboards...

Never. There are zillions of these out there you can get for free, so why try to fix one?

PeterD wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

WHERE does one get these FREE motherboards?

Most computer motherboards are 4 layer and many are 6 layer -- so problems may be present you can not see (but testing would --- takes time -- to find bad component,etc.) START with Power Bus and go from there.

For computers that old, check businesses that are doing tech refreshes. Many of them -pay- to have their computers hauled away. And many of the computers aren't that old.

MOst any independent computer repair shop will do. THey frequently have to pay to dispose of them, and are glad to give them away. Many are the result of upgrades. The local shop generates a couple of them a week, sometimes more. THey usualy have a pile of 20 or so in the scrap pile at any time.

I've fixed a lot of dead motherboards by removing the CMOS battery for a day or two. This has worked several times, even when the clear CMOS jumper didn't help. Andy Cuffe

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com

If a motherboard is showing no signs of life, how can you say that every other bigger chip is working fine? If the board is dead, meaning that it won't boot up, or even run POST tests, then how are you checking the "bigger chips? You can't assume anything in this case... everything has to be verified conclusively. The only way that I can think of doing that in the case of a dead motherboard is to unsolder the chips and put them on a known good board. Given the lack of service information on any of the PC boards that have been produced in the past 25 years, it's shooting in the dark.

I gave away a pile of them on Craigslist, I probably have some more laying around I need to dump off on there.

dead

There's no way to know. Fortunately, the big chips are very reliable. They don't normally fail unless something really bad happened (like excessive voltage from a bad power supply, or someone shorting something out). Testing the chips is completely impractical. The soldering equipment alone would cost thousands.

The way to trouble shoot a motherboard is to eliminate the few things you can fix before scrapping the board. Once you eliminate the simple stuff, it doesn't really matter whether it's a bad chipset chip, bad internal connection on the board, or some other unfixable problem.

I've repaired a lot of boards by replacing exploded caps. I've also replaced melted ATX power connectors. On one board, I even replaced some bad voltage regulator transistors (they were over heated because of bad caps). If you know the board suffered from a failed BIOS flash, you can reprogram the flash chip (it helps if it's in a socket). Andy Cuffe

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com

Papcina wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Around here, it is not worth upgrading the innards of older computes, as they don't meet modern power and cooling requiremnts, and the cases don't "match" modern fashions, so old PCs are thrown out whole, and new ones bought.

---> as they don't meet modern power and cooling requiremnts, and

---> the cases don't "match" modern fashions,

If we are asked, in the year 2525, what we did with all energy, then we can gladly answer: We built things and dumped them.

(SCNR) Regards, H.