Gadgetory


All Cool Mind-blowing Gadgets You Love in One Place

How to troubleshoot a broken PC.... Sorta

2016-03-17
how to make it go this video is going to be so raw it's going to be totally like famous porn star name here what's up guys Jays two cents here we're going to do a video that I think that is going to be write up a lot of people's wheelhouse and that is how to troubleshoot a computer that is just being a complete koel mullick max to 120 and 240 from enter max is another awesome choice of a io liquid coolers for gamers and enthusiasts without breaking the bank patented shunt channel technology provides extra layer of cooling capability click the link below to find out more so there's nothing more frustrating than especially for a new builder if you don't know what to troubleshoot you go to turn on your computer when you have power to it of course you go to turn on your computer and pretty much nothing is going to happen where you think it's booting and everything's good and then it will just shut off and then will turn back on and shut off and turn it and it needs like you're like what the hell do I do so we're going to kind of talk today about what my first steps would be on this I don't even have the DisplayPort plugged in because we know that we have C just shut off right there now if you watch it's going to turn back on and I just do that over and over and over again now the first thing I would do honestly is a most commonly when you get these types of boot loops that something isn't seated properly it could be the RAM it's very unlikely that it's the CPU considering it really only fits in there one way and this CPU has been seated ever since it was first built no problem and the graphics card now he did tell me that he transported this PC in the back of his car so it made me wonder maybe something with jostled loose so the very first thing I'm gonna do here anyway scoop my chair up I'm just gonna pop out the memory both sticks and I'm going to make sure that these are you know that everything looks good with the pins no issues there and I'm just going to reseed it you want to make sure you get clicks on both sides if you have a motherboard where it only has one tab put it on the side without the tab first put it in straight and make sure that the tab top clicks some of the newer motherboards only have a tab on the top going to do the same thing here with the mug the graphics card take off the cable take out the retention screw unplug it from the PCIe make sure it clicks in all the way make sure the retention tab is clicked and then tighten this back down turn the power supply back on if it has a toggle switch some don't if they don't unplug the power from the back power it on and let's see if we get anywhere all right well it just turned off on us so unfortunately that wasn't our problem now the CPU fan is turning so you would want to make sure that it's not turning off because of the fan not running or something like that but if that's not the case then go ahead and once again unplug your PC from power and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to unplug anything plugged into the motherboard with the exception of the front panel connectors and the RAM and graphics card so I'm not going to have any Sada's plugged in I'm not going to have any HD audio no USB plugs USB three is unplugged leave the fans plugged in and now we're going to try it again we're going to see if maybe we have some sort of a conflict with the peripheral device and if once again it's very repetitious here you kind of want to do a form of elimination here and see if anything gives you any sort of different result all right so once again it just power cycled on us with none of the peripherals plugged in so now what I'm going to do is I am going to go ahead and once again turn off power and I'm going to unplug one stick of RAM now you also need to consult to your manual on which channels need to be used for only one stick but it could be a bad stick of RAM it could be a bad memory slot so in this case here I'm just going to start with one channel and see if that gives us any different results yeah that that's farthest we've gotten yet alright so as you can see right there and what's funny about this is we've actually spent I know what an hour of troubleshooting this before even starting the video yeah this is the farthest we've gotten here where we actually got into BIOS and we did that by simply taking out one stick of RAM and what you know what's what's kind of disconcerting about this though it's the fact that we did this already and this didn't work but for the sake of the video we were going back through the steps so that's started sort of the frustrating part about troubleshooting pcs here oh look at that alright so let's go ahead and get into our BIOS this is a good sign what I want to do now that I that I got into BIOS is I want to load optimise defaults so in your BIOS settings you you're going to start your menus polygonal look all different but typically in a menu that says save and exit or something like that you can find this load optimized defaults a lot of motherboards f5 will also in this case it's low previous values let's try f8 nope try f7 there so f7 on this one is load optimized defaults so let's go ahead and do that f10 saved config and exit yes and let's see if it actually reboots and if this works I'm actually going to be shocked because we already did this and it didn't work that's normal for it to want to turn off after you do a load optimized default so it's possible I'm not even a hundred percent certain that it's bad Ram because we tried different Ram already in this interesting so let's see what happens here I know it's not looking too good see and now we're boot looping again so we've got a very intermittent problem here now we've already tried a clear CMOS that's another thing that you could always try when you do this yeah I'm I'm in one of these situations here where the problem here is so intermittent sporadic it really doesn't make any sense this one is messing with me quite literally this computer with me and I mean that because mids shooting this video we started over it decided to work we were like oh okay cool so it's working now nope it just decided to do it again so here we are that time it turned off faster okay so here are the symptoms we've got a computer here that was working fine the owner took it to work use it there no problems sat there for a while brought it look it just booted it's just so it's been sitting here boot looping and then suddenly decided to work the main BIOS is corrupted the system will be recovered from the backup BIOS please do not turn off power or reset the system this may take a few minutes oh this reboots right now you're alright come back to me so I was just saying that this thing is fun with me because we've been sitting here for a while now just boot looping at trying different things getting ready to do this video and in the middle of me kind of preparing for the next shot it just randomly booted up so anyway it said the main BIOS is corrupted system will recover from the backup BIOS this is a dual BIOS motherboard so that's a good thing but this is an old b75 LS a old piece of advice really not that old so 2013 2012 2013 ish era but it does have a dual BIOS so gigabyte is auto backing up this might end up being the problem the question is why did it corrupt it to begin with I don't know sirs we're going to do we're just gonna let this go then we're gonna see what happens next I'm not gonna bother moving forward with this video because this computer is just gonna troll the out of me anyway I'm gonna keep making this video because I'm not gonna let this computer win alright so where do I even start so I started by making a video and show you guys how to troubleshoot your computer when you start getting weird wonky things happening and I thought oh this would be fun let's go ahead and do this we can teach somebody something so while preparing for this this I didn't plug in the mouse while preparing for this video um Captain Awesome is that really you named your computer captain awesome alright anyway this is getting better and better he called me last night and he said his computer would turn on and turn off like you guys saw so he brings it over this morning because I said hey bring it over maybe we'll make a video about this he brings it over I plug it in it boot loops like crazy right about every 10 seconds it would shut off and reboot I try I swapped out the memory I swapped out the graphics card we unplugged all the peripherals from it making sure that there was no no conflicts in there all the hard drives were onions or were unplugged the USB devices were unplugged same thing unplugged the graphics card and the computer would boot well when I say boot it would power on and not power off so I said okay well let's see if maybe we're getting an image out of the IGP you plug that into the motherboard no image we the monitors light would turn blue like it thought it was going to get an image but we just got a black screen so I thought okay we're gonna make a video about this because we're going to we're going to troubleshoot this and it's going to help people so we start making the video in the middle of the video the thing just goes into into BIOS recovery and I don't mean the the BIOS recovery you saw where it was backing up but it went into a load optimized default option screen so I click load optimized default it reboots and starts boot looping again so I was like okay something is clearly not right with this computer let's go ahead and continue with the video so then we start making the video again like you guys just saw start to make where it just suddenly goes Oh BIOS has crept it lets back up and it recovered on its own it only took about a hundred boot loops for it to decide it should maybe do that so here's what we're going to do because I refuse to let this computer win we're going to talk about what I would have done based on the situation so let's say hypothetically you're still boot looping the first thing I would have done is well let me shut this down let me see if I can force it to do it again I don't know I think I think it was a BIOS corrupted BIOS and it just reflashed itself so that's a good thing ok so anyway I shut down the computer and I'm curious now as if to whether or not it's going to boot or troll so let's find out together here all right all the fans are ramping doing their thing USB came on you I was kind of hoping that it would have not actually booted so I could continue this legitimately all right so if you were getting boot loops the first thing that I would actually do is I would turn off the computer I would unplug the power cord or flip the switch if you have one of those toggle switch but for the sake of simplicity just unplug the power cord push the power button to drain all of the energy out of the system and then I would unclip the RAM and reseed it and the same dude with the graphics card I would take the graphics card out of the PCI Express slot and plug it back in if the issue continue then the next thing I would do is unplug anything on the motherboard that isn't needed I would unplug all the USB s from the back of the motherboard I would unplug not the front side connectors if your motherboard doesn't have you know built-in power buttons on the motherboard but leave the front side panels connected I would unplug SATA unplug USB 2.0 unplug USB 3.0 and anything else that might be plugged in with the exception of power and the fans then I would try and boot and see if anything improved if some if nothing improved then I would take the graphics card out of the equation unplug that and if you have an Intel CPU then you do have an IG P or a built-in HD Intel HD graphics on the CPU you can always tell because on the back of the motherboard there'll be usually an HDMI or DVI port plug the monitor into that with no graphics card and see if it boots if it doesn't boot then your issues more than likely not your graphics card and then the next thing I would quite honestly do is take everything out of the case maybe there's a short and I would start inspecting the motherboard for either swollen capacitors little black charred spots both front and back but I would take the motherboard place it on a box and then so it's kind of like a ghetto test bench and take the case out of the equation and then try and boot it if it works then you probably had a short somewhere maybe a wire was pinched behind the motherboard tray maybe it was pinched in the back of the case when you close the case up and if it works then put it all back in be very careful of how you route your wires make sure nothing's pinched on the back of the motherboard is quite often there's really sharp traces for the for the back of the motherboard where all the leads are in the solder points they can be very sharp sometimes and poke into wires and that can create a short if you put everything back in and it works great if it doesn't work when it's out on the test bench or sitting on the box it could be bad CPU more than likely a bad motherboard motherboards tend to go bad before memory or CPUs one of the things you could also do early on which I should have mentioned we were talking about reseeding the RAM is try different memory slots try different memory slots can also tell you if you've got maybe a bad memory channel if you've got more than one dim take out all but one and see if it'll boot if it doesn't boot with that one then swap it to the other to stick if it does boot you got a bad stick if it still doesn't boot could be bad memory channels could be a bad memory controller it could be a bad motherboard again there's a lot of things that it could possibly be but the point here is you want to do an order of elimination you want to take out as many equations and things that aren't needed for the bare necessities of a computer to boot to try to determine what the problem could be and the only thing your computer really needs to turn on is a CPU with the GPU in it now unfortunately AMD FX series processors do not have GPUs in them so you'd have to use the dedicated discrete graphics so if your Intel you would need just the Intel CPU motherboard memory power supply that's all you need to make it turn on and if you're on an AMD you would have to add a graphics card to that all the other stuff is peripheral and not needed to actually boot into the BIOS here we are now I want to do one more restart to see what happens it looks like this motherboard here it's problem turned out to be a corrupted BIOS and that's something that if you don't have a dual BIOS motherboard or a selectable BIOS switch which a lot in is still definitely working but if you don't have a selectable BIOS switch then a bad BIOS quite honestly can also brick your board if you can't get into the BIOS to do the flash recovery then pretty much the thing is toast and that's unfortunate but in this case he lucked out because we were quite ready to go to the store and buy new hardware now he doesn't need new hardware whether or not he wants new hardware that's another thing if only we knew a place where there was a lot of hardware just kind of hanging out not not being used or utilized not this place I was going to do everything I just mentioned for the sake of this video but the point here is that now it would have just been going through the motions and not showing you whether or not it would have solved the problem to start doing the process of elimination because as funny as it is we were laughing we quite honestly we're laughing this computer trolled me it waited we we sat it for an hour I at least 20 minutes at one point I just let go I just let it keep boot looping because some other boards like you saw will detect that there's a problem and then it will kind of start to do a correct my gigabyte motherboard that I use upstairs did it x99 EVGA board has done it for me where after a few bad loops it'll recognize like Oh something didn't wrong go right and it will fall back to kind of a fail-safe err last known good configuration this one for whatever reason just waited what two days to do it he saved a little bit of money but I think he might be itching to upgrade anyway especially since he has the atrocity of having an i-5 35 70 K in a b75 LGA 1155 yeah you'll get to get up here you're gonna face the facts or the camera man owns this computer right now I'm giving him cuz he's got a case Q CPU and a b75 motherboard guys thanks for watching today's video I'm sorry that I couldn't actually go through the process of elimination I will find a bad computer I'll find someone with a bad computer hit me up if you guys are local to me and you've got a bad computer maybe we can figure this out together anyway guys thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next attempted video
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.