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After several days of proscratinating, I finally got around to gutting open my computer and doing a full diagnosis. For that purpose, I borrowed WL’s computer as a base since she was using the exact same motherboard model as I was. The process involved swapping out each computer part, booting up the computer, and essentially keeping your fingers crossed that nothing crashed. The parts that I tested included the harddisk, central processing unit (CPU), 3 x SDRAM modules, and graphics card.

First on the table was the harddisk which was easy enough to swap out. A few keystrokes in BIOS was all that is required to set up the motherboard to recognise the new harddrive. It booted up without any fuss. So that ruled out a software (Operating System) fault or a harddrive failure. Since it was up and running, I took the opportunity to do some housekeeping. It was then that I realised my main partition was down to 350MB and my secondary partition had only 700MB of space left! Where did my space go?! Some investigation revealed that someone had copied 1.7GBs worth of pictures (my sister’s wedding) into my secondary partition. That wasn’t a very good move considering that I only have 10GB of real estate to work with, of which Windows and the basic programs take up a good quarter of. Since I know my harddrive has some bad sectors on it, it explains why I was running into occasional ‘blue screen of death’s and why the comp kept complaining about insufficient swap space.

Second on the list was the graphics card. I had tested out the card the day before in the office and it had turned up empty on problems. But for the sake of completeness, I plugged it into WL’s system and switched on the computer. Window’s default wallpaper appearing on screen confirmed that there was nothing wrong with the graphics card. The broken fan was not the problem. It was something else.

The RAM modules were easy to enough to test but a little tedious since I wanted to check each one in turn. I had three strips so that meant repeating the process three times; once for each memory module. Interesting enough, I discovered that Windows XP was able to run on 64MB of memory, albeit very slow.

The CPU was the hardest part to test. Since WL was using a mini ATX casing, the box was overcrowded with wiring. The worst part was that the power supply was sitting directly over the CPU, making it impossible to get any angle on releasing the catch that held the heat sink in place. 4 screws later, the power supply was off and out of the way. From there on out, the process went smoothly. I slotted in all three of my memory modules to see how they worked together with the CPU. They worked perfectly fine.

So after all that, I discovered that there was nothing wrong with the individual components. It was indeed the motherboard that was broken! I wonder if it is that little battery. Probably not. More on that later. Now I’ve gotta run.