Repairing My PC
I have repaired my PC a couple of months ago. However since my experience was a little unusual, I have decided to blog about it. Looking back, I don't think many people would go through the inconvenient route I take, but will save the trouble and buy a new PC instead.
This PC was given to me by a relative. When I received this PC, the harddisk was already spoilt (unable to detect). The PC was originally a Hewlett Packard Brio BA600 (Pentium III 700 MHz, 64 MB RAM, 10 GB harddisk, built-in soundcard) and was meant to be used with Windows 98 Second Edition.
Trying to restore life to the Brio BA600 had been an uphill task. I bought a new 80 GB Seagate harddisk and plug it into the PC. Unfortunately, it seems that the motherboard could not recognize the full 80 GB harddisk space. Well... I could either buy an IDE card or use Dynamic Drive Overlay (DDO). I chose the latter. At first, I tried using the Seagate Dynamic Drive Overlay software, but the software seems to have trouble installing DDO on the harddisk. In the end, I used the IBM Dynamic Drive Overlay software which somehow worked.
For anyone who is using DDO, you would know that installing a Windows operating system is not as simple as inserting the Windows CD and immediately start going through the installation wizard. As DDO has to load first before the operating system, the Windows CD cannot detect the full 80 GB space recognized by the DDO software. After the DDO software loads up, it would prompt the user to insert a floppy boot diskette. To proceed with the installation of Windows XP, I had to create 6 startup diskettes.
During the installation of Windows XP, the process could not continue after the first reboot and the PC would hang at a particular screen. After repeating the installation a couple of times without success, I decided to install Windows 2000 instead. This installation requires 4 startup diskettes.
At first, Windows 2000 seems to run smoothly on the PC. However, a couple of days later, the PC began to spontaneously reboot by itself. The reboots happen with increasing frequency until every time I boots up my PC, it rebooted right after Windows 2000 finished loading all the devices.
Thinking that my initial installation was incorrect, I reinstalled Windows 2000. Alas, it did not solve the rebooting issue. I have even tried installing Windows 98 a couple of times, but it too gave me the same problem.
I thought to myself: someone else might have the same problem that I was facing and began looking around the Internet for some answers. After searching through many pages that led to dead ends, I managed to go to the correct HP forum where I finally found my answer. Immediately, I opened up the PC casing and saw that all 10 capacitors in the motherboard were leaking.
As you can see from the above picture, the capacitors were obviously the cause of the problem I was facing. There was some sort of gooey stuff leaking from the capacitors.
Usually, a spoilt motherboard would be sent back to the PC vendor, but since this PC is already out of warranty, I decided to take matters into my own hands (literally!) by replacing the capacitors in the motherboard on my own.
I went down to Sim Lim Tower to get myself 10 capacitors as replacements. Here is a picture of one of the new capacitors below.
Desoldering all 10 capacitors from the motherboard was pretty hard work and it took me about 3 hours to desolder them all. After that, I took extreme care in soldering in the new capacitors. To be honest, my soldering skills suck.
The finished result can be seen below.
Without putting the motherboard back into the PC casing, I decided to load Windows 98, praying that the PC would not explode in my face. Hmmm... no smoke. No exploding capacitors yet... And the best thing is that Windows 98 did not spontaneously reboot at all. Problem solved! I left the PC running for a couple of hours.
Feeling a little more confident, I installed Windows XP on the PC. It has been a couple of months now, and I am currently using this PC as my main system. Since then, I have added an additional 256 MB RAM, a network card, a 4-port USB 2.0 PCI card, as well as connected my PC to an existing Creative Extigy. I have also replaced the HP 15" CRT monitor with a Philips 107C64 17" CRT monitor and added a Saitek Eclipse "illuminated" keyboard and Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer to my PC setup.
This PC was given to me by a relative. When I received this PC, the harddisk was already spoilt (unable to detect). The PC was originally a Hewlett Packard Brio BA600 (Pentium III 700 MHz, 64 MB RAM, 10 GB harddisk, built-in soundcard) and was meant to be used with Windows 98 Second Edition.
Trying to restore life to the Brio BA600 had been an uphill task. I bought a new 80 GB Seagate harddisk and plug it into the PC. Unfortunately, it seems that the motherboard could not recognize the full 80 GB harddisk space. Well... I could either buy an IDE card or use Dynamic Drive Overlay (DDO). I chose the latter. At first, I tried using the Seagate Dynamic Drive Overlay software, but the software seems to have trouble installing DDO on the harddisk. In the end, I used the IBM Dynamic Drive Overlay software which somehow worked.
For anyone who is using DDO, you would know that installing a Windows operating system is not as simple as inserting the Windows CD and immediately start going through the installation wizard. As DDO has to load first before the operating system, the Windows CD cannot detect the full 80 GB space recognized by the DDO software. After the DDO software loads up, it would prompt the user to insert a floppy boot diskette. To proceed with the installation of Windows XP, I had to create 6 startup diskettes.
During the installation of Windows XP, the process could not continue after the first reboot and the PC would hang at a particular screen. After repeating the installation a couple of times without success, I decided to install Windows 2000 instead. This installation requires 4 startup diskettes.
At first, Windows 2000 seems to run smoothly on the PC. However, a couple of days later, the PC began to spontaneously reboot by itself. The reboots happen with increasing frequency until every time I boots up my PC, it rebooted right after Windows 2000 finished loading all the devices.
Thinking that my initial installation was incorrect, I reinstalled Windows 2000. Alas, it did not solve the rebooting issue. I have even tried installing Windows 98 a couple of times, but it too gave me the same problem.
I thought to myself: someone else might have the same problem that I was facing and began looking around the Internet for some answers. After searching through many pages that led to dead ends, I managed to go to the correct HP forum where I finally found my answer. Immediately, I opened up the PC casing and saw that all 10 capacitors in the motherboard were leaking.
As you can see from the above picture, the capacitors were obviously the cause of the problem I was facing. There was some sort of gooey stuff leaking from the capacitors.
Usually, a spoilt motherboard would be sent back to the PC vendor, but since this PC is already out of warranty, I decided to take matters into my own hands (literally!) by replacing the capacitors in the motherboard on my own.
I went down to Sim Lim Tower to get myself 10 capacitors as replacements. Here is a picture of one of the new capacitors below.
Desoldering all 10 capacitors from the motherboard was pretty hard work and it took me about 3 hours to desolder them all. After that, I took extreme care in soldering in the new capacitors. To be honest, my soldering skills suck.
The finished result can be seen below.
Without putting the motherboard back into the PC casing, I decided to load Windows 98, praying that the PC would not explode in my face. Hmmm... no smoke. No exploding capacitors yet... And the best thing is that Windows 98 did not spontaneously reboot at all. Problem solved! I left the PC running for a couple of hours.
Feeling a little more confident, I installed Windows XP on the PC. It has been a couple of months now, and I am currently using this PC as my main system. Since then, I have added an additional 256 MB RAM, a network card, a 4-port USB 2.0 PCI card, as well as connected my PC to an existing Creative Extigy. I have also replaced the HP 15" CRT monitor with a Philips 107C64 17" CRT monitor and added a Saitek Eclipse "illuminated" keyboard and Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer to my PC setup.
posted by beowulf at 4:16 PM
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