Friend called me - his Gateway acting weird. I brought over a box full of HDD's, cables, some PC's, Linux CD's etc.
We screwed around for hours. Swapping HDD's around, etc. In his BIOS, the IDE Configuration was set to RAID. We replaced the CMOS battery (the only reason I could think of for BIOS to go changing itself) and he was able to run Windows Repair. The PC sat for hours at the end of the Repair process saying "Please wait". He rebooted and it ran.
I asked him to bring it over to my well-lit shop so I could clean it out and replace thermal paste on all heatsinks. I had a feeling we hadn't solved the problem. Once we got it on the bench and got some light on it, we could see three bad caps on the Intel board.
I contacted Gateway's tech chat. It looks like he's out of luck. They blew me off.
We screwed around for hours. Swapping HDD's around, etc. In his BIOS, the IDE Configuration was set to RAID. We replaced the CMOS battery (the only reason I could think of for BIOS to go changing itself) and he was able to run Windows Repair. The PC sat for hours at the end of the Repair process saying "Please wait". He rebooted and it ran.
I asked him to bring it over to my well-lit shop so I could clean it out and replace thermal paste on all heatsinks. I had a feeling we hadn't solved the problem. Once we got it on the bench and got some light on it, we could see three bad caps on the Intel board.
I contacted Gateway's tech chat. It looks like he's out of luck. They blew me off.
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