Daily Archives: November 6, 2008

Day 6 – Kicking hardware into working

I spent this evening building my new computer, getting it all plugged in with the cables tidied away in a small (read a little too small) case.

3 hours later, everything is connected. Moment of truth… and nothing happens. Red light on the motherboard, not POSTing. 1 On initial power, the CPU fan twitches.

I’ve seen this one happen once before – the motherboard is probably touching the case. (A hardware guy at work also suggested that it might be fluff in the CPU socket, bent or damaged pin.) You can get plastic sheets to put under the motherboard. Last time, I and my brother used sellatape – put it over the pillers the motherboard is raised on, and then screwed through the sellatape. Before I try something quite that drastic though, tomorrow evening I’ll try taking the board out and check its raise clear from the case. I’ll probably also remove one or two of the pillers.

I did mean to take pictures of building it, but then I though, who would be interested?!  Heh, I’m just dumping this from my mind as I haven’t had time to prepare anything else… If this is actually interesting to you, please comment 😉

  1. The Power On Self Test is the basic test a computer goes through when you switch it on. Hardware information is displayed on the screen (unless its been replaced with a logo), and at the end of it, it normally beeps if its OK. Otherwise, it doesn’t make a sound.