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Finally realized why my shop PC kept crashing after 2 years of fighting it
Last week I was troubleshooting a customer's machine and it hit me that my own rig had the same issue. For 2 years I was swapping RAM and reinstalling drivers to fix random freezes. Turned out it was a bad solder joint on the motherboard under the CPU socket. I used a multimeter to trace it and found a cold joint on a tiny capacitor. Has anyone else spent months chasing a ghost issue only to find it was hardware the whole time?
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dianahayes17d ago
Oh man, that motherboard joint thing is brutal. I had a similar ghost chase with an old gaming PC that would blue screen randomly - turned out to be a faulty CMOS battery. I know, sounds dumb, but the voltage was dipping just enough to corrupt the BIOS settings sometimes. Swapped it out for a fresh CR2032 (like $2 at the grocery store) and it ran perfectly for another 3 years. What finally tipped me off was checking the system clock - it kept resetting to 2001 after every shutdown. Sometimes the simplest fix is the one you overlook, right?
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jasonf1717d agoMost Upvoted
No cap, I used to think CMOS battery failures were just a myth from the old days. But you're right, I had a similar thing with an old Dell where the date kept jumping back, swapped that little battery and it was like a brand new PC.
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michael_coleman1017d ago
Yeah I used to be one of those people too, thought CMOS batteries were something out of old tech manuals nobody actually dealt with. Then I had an HP that kept forgetting the boot order and @dianahayes mentioned the clock thing and it clicked - swapped that little battery and boom, problem gone. Funny how the simplest fixes are the ones you just don't think about first.
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