Phew! Happy to be back to my desktop!

If you remember my post from Saturday, my old PC crashed on me.

Or, to be exact, its power source did.

Since then, I've been working on my laptop, and I'm grateful for that, because I needed to get used to it too, but... I couldn't wait to go back to my desktop PC.

Here are a few reasons:

• much spacier keyboard, although with a few annoying exceptions, I've got used to the keyboard of the laptop too
• way bigger display to fit much more stuff on it; I know I could've connected the monitor to my laptop, but it's nothing I could've done about the resolution, so the experience wouldn't have improved noticeably
• I have a decade of tools installed on my PC (hmm, I need to leap to mostly distributed or cloud-based tools that work regardless of device)
• different customizations (well, none on the laptop at first, since it's the first time I really used it since I bought it), different operating systems

That were some very good reasons to look forward to go back to my desktop as soon as possible, at least in my book.

So, when I received the call that the package with my new power source is about to arrive, I couldn't be happier!

^Source

Plus, I haven't dove my nose inside my PC in a long time. But... first things first. I don't even want to describe to you the amount of dust I could extract from in there! Oh my!

If you keep your PC nice and clean (without hiring someone for regular maintenance), congratulations! I used to do that years back, but not as much as you can see.

So, after some cleaning, dismantling the old power source and more cleaning, I finally got to the part where I installed the new power source.

Everything connected, plugged in, power on... nothing! All fans were working, so main board got power obviously, hard disk started, no beep, no image. Hmm, that could be bad, or relatively simple.

^Source

I started with the simple part, to remove the obvious possibilities. Maybe I mistakenly bumped into a component while connecting the wires of the source, and it's no longer firm into its position.

Although the memory modules are very well set in their place, I thought I should start with the most exposed of them. I was going to reset the other memory module too, and try to start the computer with only one module at a time, in case one of them was busted for some reason.

But... luckily, after I removed the first module the computer started normally.

So, as I was in Windows, with only one memory module on, I thought I should create a boot-able flash drive with memtest86, to test the whole memory, once I re-set the module that I took off. That is if the computer would start with it on.

I did that, turned off the computer, re-set the memory module in its slot, made sure the clamps were well attached, and started the PC again!

So far so good, it boots up, so I changed the boot sequence to start from the flash drive and ran the memory diagnostic tool. To be extra cautious, I let it run for 2 passes, and everything was still fine!

Hurray! It was the simple fix, otherwise most scenarios I could think of led to more money being spend on what is already a very old system.

Phew! All well when ends well, right? :)

Cheers!

^Source