confirm my mobo diagnosis and help with customer resolution

[crossedup]

Moderator: am posting this here because i am addressing several differant tech issues and just asking opinions, not solutions.

my diagnosis: have (or had) pc that was sold and came back. Sold about christmas and 2 weeks later was told monitor was dead. i did not sell monitor so was none of my concern. owners mom has gone through MCSE training, figured was her problem, she had some know how. (WRONG!)

today, still not fixed. went over and looked at it, seemed to be monitor. brought it home, hooked it up still nothing, obviously not monitor. tried differant video card (has onboard), nothing. tried differant known working ram sticks, nothing. cleared bios, pulled battery, checked cpu fsb settings, no avail.

got speaker to work, finally something. 2 beeps then 1 beep. its amibios so chart tells me this is memory problem, change or check memory if no solution probably is motherboard.

question: about 6 months or so ago floppy channel quit working, chalked it up to bad floppy. 3 months later ide channel one appeared to quit working. didnt put 2 and 2 together, just moved hd and cdrom to channel 2, no problem.

Sold system cheap with case mods, informed buyer of no floppy. etc. they didnt mind

NOW: i have concluded that mobo must be dead. it is a slot one, PII 400. does this sound right?

i have found a replacement at Axiontech for $14.95. should i charge customer? or eat it

are these errors logical progression in mobo failure and would memory slots be next and, therefore, is it my fault for not catching it first?

would it soften things over if i gave them loaner pc while fixing it? if i did this could i justify not eating repair costs? am only going to charge for parts anyway as i do now feel this is my fault.

sorry so long, any input appreciated.

:confused: :t

[BipolarBill]

You sold her a sub-standard system. If it was sold "as is", however, you are absolved.

Ask her to pay for the part and you eat the labor. It's good for business.

[crossedup]

thanks bi-polar, i knew you would help with this

yes, was sold as is.

what about progression of mobo errors, do they usually fail this way? first one ive ever really had go on me, thought mb's were pretty sound.

:confused:

That was solution i was thinking of, would loaner make me look pretty good?:D

[BipolarBill]

Give her the loaner.

I've discovered that anything can happen in the real world. A progressive chain of events is quite possible.

[crossedup]

okay bill, appreciate the input. will go with that. :)

anyone else wants to comment with experiences i would like to see them, sure mobo failure or otherwise repair issues have occurred to someone else.

:t

[BipolarBill]

Last night, I dropped a PCI card in a running PC. It crossed two traces near the ITE chip and shut the PC down. When I booted back up, the BIOS reported 92°C and 4.7 volts - exactly twice the real numbers. Otherwise it's fine. Go figger.

...and you thought you'd seen it all? :p

[gjimene2]

I've haven't seen it all, now how about this for you bill.


You get a customer who wants you to RMA a comp, but the catch is that her daughter put in gummy bears and juicy juice (I've seen her drinkin the stuff alot and found some semi dry gummy liquid inside same color as what she was drinking)

Anyways, you clean it up to get rid of every sign of what she did and you RMA it back to HP. Yea, HP, High Price, POS, even that model was known for problems. Well it comes back you do the OS upgrade from XP Home to XP Pro, and add in Quicken 2003 and that's it. You leave it turned on and use it and monitor is to see if it came back allright from it's RMA (supposedly replacement) and it works fine.

Now here is where the fun stuff begins.

You take it to her house and plug it in, it powers on, xp starts, you show her kid how to shut it down, and do so. Then when the kid tries to power it on, ZIP, pc turns off, and the only way you can make it post again is by unplugging from psu and let the charge drain and plug it back in. But everytime you do that, ZIP, it happens again.

So you ask the regular questions of how the lighting in the house is, have they noticed lights getting dimmer, or has there been outages in their house (even though it was rebuilt) and they tell you that when they turn on the dryer and the washer that some lights in the house go off or when they have alot of lights on the lights will flicker, turn off or just get dimm.

The good thing the kid had a UPS, so I plugged it in and told him not to use the comp for 24hrs so the battery will charge. This way the system will get clean unterruptible power and hopefully it won't be anything else.

How about that for f***ed up?

Another bad thing is that she bought the HP from office depot, and only had 30 days for it to be returned for full money back and she bought it in November of last year and had problems with it since novermber, and the worst thing is that she's too stubborn to eat her loss and insists that I RMA the thing back to HP every time it goes bad because it has it's 3-year warranty instead of letting me build her a new system with pulled parts from the HP.

How about that for seeing it all? lol.

[crossedup]

were you statically grounded bill, hate to see hair stick up? LOL

what kind of pci card?

:t

so much for buying pre-built gij. build yourself always better ( i know you agree with this, just general thought for all reading.):D

[BipolarBill]

Well, she did get an upgrade and only paid postage - right? :cool:

[BipolarBill]

Originally posted by crossedup
what kind of pci card? It was a Creative PCI128. I had pulled it and restarted to try and detect the onboard sound in a Soyo TISU. The card was teetering on another card while the PC was on it's side. I kneed the PC and it fell between cards.

As it turns out, the sound circuitry is defective and the board is being RMA'd for that reason. I won't mention my boo-boo. :cool: I'll pay shipping one-way and be back in the game.

[gjimene2]

Originally posted by BipolarBill
Well, she did get an upgrade and only paid postage - right? :cool:

She paid a hefty price for some stuff she wanted, like WinXP Pro, and she didn't want the upgrade, she wanted full non-oem blown copy as well as a toy for her daugter, like a wizpad or some ****.

Then there where the charges I had to make for loosing a day of work waiting for the **** empty box to come in and getting rid of the "Evidence" of what her daughter did, and then the charges made for the Upgrade when the other one came in, and it was a tricky because I had to manually install some drivers for it's AGP bridge (intel graphics with Nvidia drivers, UGH) and then for the installation of Quicken 2003.

And she knows that everyime it comes to RMA, she'll be forking over no less than $50 because phone cards ain't cheap, and there is no 1-800# for HP as well for my time.

It it looks like it's aiming towards scrapping up everything but the mobo & cpu from that HP and I'm turning her to AMD :D (It currently has a 1.8GHZ Celly on it)