Is my computer dead?

olimess

New Member
I'm hoping some of you can give me some insight on a problem I'm having with my computer.


I have an HP m7760n PC. The specifications can be found here. I changed out the original TV tuner card and replaced it with a dual TV tuner card. I also added an ATI Radeon HD 2600 video card. Other then that, the computer is the same as the original specifications.

I use this PC mainly as a media center PC for watching/recording TV and for watch DVDs. Recently I noticed that a fan was going off (was rotating quicker and getting louder) in the computer with much more frequency then I had previously heard. My suspicion was that it was the CPU. I ended up installing a temperature monitoring program to see if I could catch this and sure enough the Duo Core was peaking out at 85-90 degrees C for each core! That's hot. The cores idled at 65-70 degrees C.

The first thing I did was to blowout my PC to get rid of dust. There was plenty of dust in there but that didn't solve the problem. Next I downloaded the latest bios for the motherboard just to make sure it was properly reading the temperatures. Again, this didn't solve the problem. Finally I decided that I would replace the thermal paste between the fan and cpu.

As I pulled off the fan I noticed that two of the four poles that hold the fan in place were broken. So basically the thermal paste (which had bonded the fan to the cpu somewhat) had been holding the one end of the fan in place but was obviously coming undone ... likely the cause of the overheating issues.

At this point I made a trip to the nearest computer store and purchased a replacement cpu cooling fan (for socket 775). The fan was a little big and it took sometime to get it installed. I installed the new fan and tried starting up the computer.

The computer sounds like it start fine. I see all the fans spinning, it sounds like the hard drive is spinning but nothing else happens. No video is output to my monitor. Come to think of it, I don't hear an initial startup BEEP from the motherboard either? I tried taking off the new fan and re-setting it on top of the CPU assuming I must have set it in wrong. Still the same problem. I then tried disconnecting my HD video card, TV tuner, slave hard drive and tried running the computer so that just the main hard drive is installed and the video cable is installed to the on-board VGA connection. Still the same issue. I tried replacing the new fan with the old fan (knowing that really wouldn't matter) but it still made no difference.

I'm lost! Can anyone suggest any other troubleshooting tips or does anyone have an idea of what might be wrong?

Thanks for your time!
 
Last edited:
Yes, I used thermail paste when installing the new CPU fan. I was also very careful when I did this.

One person suggests that the soldering points on the back of the motherboard may have weaken due to the high termperature of the CPU previously. As a result, when I tried to install the new CPU cooling fan, it may have caused the motherboard to become defective. I wonder if there is any truth to that.


I'm currently testing the motherboard by removing all RAM, CPU etc. to see if it beeps at me. Some else suggested that the motherboard should beep continously without RAM and other things. So far I haven't heard a beep of any kind, no matter what I do.
 
I think the motherboard and/or the CPU is pouched. Damn shame. Looks like I'll need to find a new motherboard and CPU.

Questions: If I find the same motherboard and the same CPU will I be able to swap everything over on to the new motherboard and have the computer startup and run without any further configuring?
 
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