Or maybe not bad karma, but something. And bad.
I recently celebrated the arrival of my new PC, which was a tad more difficult to assemble than expected, but in the end booted up without issue and has hummed along nicely since.
Until last night, at around 3:30 a.m. At that time it disconnected from IRC while I slept, unaware of what was to come.
In the morning I immediately spied something wrong. I normally set the keyboard to its bizarre, useless backlight configuration of “strobing rainbow” because it makes for a groovy night light. Instead of seeing this, the keyboard backlight was off. The power light on the monitor was also amber. Amber is never good.
But the sinister red LED on the HSF was still on, so the unit apparently had power. My first bit of troubleshooting was to hit the reset button to reboot the PC. This had the unexpected effect of cranking the fans up to super turbo mode. Alarmed, I held down the power button to shut the machine off. This had no effect.
I used the switch on the PSU itself and this worked better, turning the whole thing off. I flicked this switch back on and this time nothing at all happened. The sinister red LED on the HSF remained dark, as did the keyboard and display. I was sad. I was also out of time, as I had to head off to work.
Upon getting home I opened up the case and inspected everything, looking for things that might be loose or unplugged. Everything checked out fine, except for one of the cables plugged into the modular PSU. It seemed to be ever-so-slightly loose, so I reseated it. I put the case back together, plugged everything back in and hit the power button.
Nothing happened. My troubleshooting is now over.
I’m thinking it may be the motherboard for the following reasons:
- there is evidence power is still getting through, as things like the network light still work
- bad ram or CPU would produce an error message
- a bad video card would not affect the keyboard (to my knowledge)
- the video and keyboard not working both point to the motherboard as the source of the problem
It’s possible the PSU may be at fault, and it would be easier to swap it out to test first, but I still lean toward the motherboard based on all other evidence. I’ve asked for other opinions and am willing to be persuaded otherwise, but I suspect part of tomorrow will be spent buying and then installing a different motherboard and seeing what happens when I press the power switch. I am hoping my reaction will not be this:
