8 September 26
Computer In Drydock
One of the motivations for building one’s own computer is that if something goes wrong with it one should be able to repair it. Alas, I am putting this to the test right now. After booting perfectly for 13 months, the workstation that I built in May 2025 started having trouble booting. At first this wasn’t a big deal — I would just power it up several times and it would boot. Watching the POST (power-on self test) LED indicators it was clear this problem was hardware related — the boot failure was occurring before the computer loaded in the operating system code. Just before we left for Spain, the computer changed from booting after several times to only booting once in a blue moon.
After reading up on POST failures and testing all the components I could think I concluded by elimination the computer has a motherboard problem. The good news is that the motherboard is the least expensive electronic component in the system (the extraordinary increase in the price of memory is part of that) and that it is still under warranty; the bad news is that the computer needs to be taken mostly apart to remove the motherboard so it can be shipped off. I spent yesterday afternoon dissecting my computer and today I went to the shipping store downtown to send the motherboard off to the manufacturer (total shipping cost $24). We will see if this leads to a working computer in a couple of weeks. These are very bad times for the PC building hobby, all part of the enclosure movement occurring all across information technology.
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