The Last Candle

My main desktop, a cobbled-together PC, is evidently destined to be replaced about every two years: in 2004, I plunked down some cash to buy a new chassis, motherboard and CPU to upgrade the Celeron processor that was adept at running Word and little else; 2006’s upgrade occurred after acquiring some extra funds courtesy of a tax return, metamorphosing what was a Word machine in a everything-on-high-quality gaming box.

Now the time for 2008’s upgrade has come. The figurative starter pistol signifying the upgrade fired early this morning, after an attempt to wake up the desktop PC from the usual overnight sleep-mode status resulted in…nothing. Silence. No power.

The quick assumption was that the power supply had blown a gasket — fair enough guess, since, well, the power part of the computer-worky equation was obviously absent during the whole, y’know, power-on part. I didn’t have a multimeter on hand to test the voltage that the PSU was supposedly providing to the mainboard, but troubleshooting was underway once I dropped by the parents’ house for the weekly visit, hauling the computer along with me in the hopes of borrowing one of the ‘meters owned by my Dad. Once at the abode and provisioned with a selection of voltage-meters, I set to work and tested the supply for signs of life.

Before I began taking voltage checks, the only signs regarding the health of the power supply were 1) the motherboard wasn’t powering up, which could either be a sign of a bad PSU or a bad motherboard, and 2) the power supply was making a high-pitched electric squeal-growl when turned on. A power supply that supports an ATX motherboard doesn’t power on its internal fan unless the motherboard is also powered on, so I’d have to investigate via less-obvious methods. In a case like this, either everything comes to life or nothing does.

After ditching one multimeter that couldn’t be bothered to give a correct reading (the stupid thing alternated between giving a random milli-volt reading or a long whiny beep with “SHRT” displayed, regardless if the circuit was completed), another multimeter deemed the voltage output from the PSU to be satisfactory — a correct five volts of DC power was pulled from the stand-by power pin, a pin that sends power regardless if the motherboard was on or not. A reading from the stand-by pin is a good beginning indicator that a supply is okay, but knowing for sure would require testing the 12V, 5V and 3.3V pins.

Easiest way to check the rest of those voltages: plug the power supply into an old, unused motherboard and see if gears started turning. Once I got back to my apartment, I did exactly that — and after I did plug in power supply to old motherboard, that old motherboard and power supply’s fans started right up, which was all the evidence I needed to determine that the supply was indeed in good shape.

Which means my desktop PC’s motherboard is very likely toast. There’s nothing wrong with your stomach or lungs, but your heart and vascular system is basically dead, and so are you.

Assuming the motherboard is dead, the departure would be the third time I’ve lost a mainboard to a mechanical fault; the first two breakdowns happened to the same brand and model ‘board (bought twice in a row, once after the first board crashed and burned) that I later discovered was known to choke on its own tongue more often than is acceptable. Fortunately motherboards burning out on their own just isn’t common — the hardware is solid-state enough that the cause of collapse is most often attributed to a consequent of another component failure (e.g., a failing power supply, or a front-side-bus fan that stops working), or more likely the motherboard survives up through the time it is discarded after an upgrade.

I have no idea why this board is dead, of course. This PC is rarely taxed, certainly not hard enough to necessitate its fairly high-powered innards. The graphics card was top of the line two years ago, smart and fast enough to run whatever gee-whiz game had come out at the time, but nine out of ten games run I’ve on this box could be run on a computer that’s five or six years old. (When I bought the video card, the first game I cranked up? Planescape: Torment, in all of its beautiful 2D glory.) This machine is used primarily and almost all of the time for archiving files and media, composing non-writing creative work (e.g., photo- and video-editing — I do all my writing on the MacBook), coding, and yes, playing the occasional game once or twice a week. This machine is a necessary tool in my weekly and daily repertoire, as geeky and introverted that repertoire is.

But while the desktop mainstay is a necessary tool, it doesn’t need to be supercharged, million-RPM tool — I just need a box so I can archive, compose, code and play a bit. That’s why this year’s changing of the hardware will be Downgrade ‘08, not Upgrade ‘08. More testing of other critical components is needed (please, please let the hard drive — the one with 40 GB of non-backed-up photos — be well and dandy), but I’m assuming that a motherboard replacement is all that’s necessary to get the whole rig steaming along as it did before this minor upset. Once that’s decided, point me towards the least-expensive dependable motherboard I can buy, just enough so I can get back to my files, media and simple games.

Dusting out the inside of the computer case wouldn’t hurt either, given the opportunity, seeing as opening the side cover revealed a sort of dust-bunny metropolis cooped up inside the chassis. An ounce of prevention and all that, although I might already be paying a few pounds worth of cure.

What if I did decide to upgrade the main desktop? Problems — money-wise ones. The hardware generation has changed so much since the last upgrade that a hardware swap would require exchanging all three major logic components — motherboard, CPU and RAM — since each component depends on the presence and compatibility of the other two. My now-dead, digital-cadaver desktop was given a CPU upgrade six months ago, and even back then the choice of upgrades was singular: only one model of AMD x64 dual-core processor was available for the motherboard’s 939 socket, as all previously-released models had been discontinued to make room for an inventory of processors dedicated to the latest socket. I wouldn’t expect even that last model to exist now, having probably run out of production and stock months ago.

A current-generation mainboard would require a current-generation processor that fits into the current-generation socket, and the lot would be supplemented by the current-generation RAM technology. Cost: non-trivial by a long measure, and a little pointless besides, honestly, because the high-power hardware would be used mostly for editing photos and reading RSS feeds.

But I still really some sort of desktop up and running, hence Downgrade 2008.