ECS RS485M-M

[armtuk]

Well - in the continuing saga of Sarah's Mum's computer. We got a call from her this week saying that she was having problems with the thing shutting itself off. It would beep like a cell phone in the distance, then shut off. I knew what was going on, the CPU was overheating. Oh crap I thought, I really hope it's not a bad CPU. So anyhow, we get the system here today, and I take a look. The Heatsink looks like it's coupled to the CPU ok, but the fan is running too slow. So we take it down to Microcenter to their tech support. They have a couple of guys that you can bring computers too and they help you with them. Well this guy was in a bad mood, and he was absolutely no help at all. I mean he didn't even bother to check the BIOS settings at first until I told him to look in the BIOS at the CPU temp. Somehow he thought that the temp sensor in the CPU Heatsink reading 43 Celsius was normal. Wow. Has this guy even taking a Computer's temperature before? So after waiting about 45 minutes for him to poke and prod the computer and tell us nothing, we decided to go with Alex's hunch - a bad motherboard. The BIOS was clearly reporting the CPU fan spinning at 0 RPM which was a bad sign. And I figured it was a mobo problem, so we got a new mobo. We got back here to home and I got the new board installed. Booted it, CPU idle temp of 34 Celsius. Much better. Clearly the fan was spinning faster too. So we started up one of Jacquie's programs and it worked fine, in fact it ran nice and fast. Total success.

Well - this was the first ECS mobo I tried, and I'm none too impressed.