My wife asked me to take a look at her friend's computer as it had what sounded like a usual spyware infestation. It was pretty badly infected, but the USB ports were dead and would reboot at random, even in the BIOS screen. I took the drive out to backup her data and noticed that there are NO electrolytic caps on the MB at all. No apparent solder pads for them either. None of the surface mount parts stood out as caps either.
The PC is a Gateway with a Slot-A athlon 650. Looks like a standard ATX board. PS is weird as it's an SFX size in a rather large case, but the mounting hole is SFX size too. Haven't had a chance to crack the PS, but the PC behaved the same with a known good PS.
Now it barely does anything. It has about a 50% chance of getting to the gateway logo and hanging or just displaying nothing at all. Swapped everything except the MB/CPU and it still does the same.
Am I missing something? Does this board really have no caps and just rely on the PS regulation? At this point I'm going to have to tell her it's dead after thinking it was going to be a simple nuke and pave.
Don't have the exact model right now, I'll post that and a pic after I get off work.
The PC is a Gateway with a Slot-A athlon 650. Looks like a standard ATX board. PS is weird as it's an SFX size in a rather large case, but the mounting hole is SFX size too. Haven't had a chance to crack the PS, but the PC behaved the same with a known good PS.
Now it barely does anything. It has about a 50% chance of getting to the gateway logo and hanging or just displaying nothing at all. Swapped everything except the MB/CPU and it still does the same.
Am I missing something? Does this board really have no caps and just rely on the PS regulation? At this point I'm going to have to tell her it's dead after thinking it was going to be a simple nuke and pave.
Don't have the exact model right now, I'll post that and a pic after I get off work.
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