Fried Motherboard

Wallace · **Posted:** Wed Jan 15, 2020 6:35 pm **(#1)**

Been dealing with replacing the dead motherboard in my main PC.
It went suddenly,
with catastrophic failure.
I went through removing and replacing,
every component to check it's functionality.
The board was dead after all.

Anyway...
I got the new motherboard in the mail.
Installed it and everything is good as new,
with some slight improvements.

During all this time,
I was using my 12+ year old (very slow) Dell OptiPlex 745 Mini Tower.

Tas_mania · **Joined:** Nov 04, 2015 **Posts:** 1365

Thats too bad Wallace. I wonder how your windows install coped with a new motherboard? Did you have to re-activate or did it just accept it?

Wallace · **Posted:** Wed Jan 15, 2020 8:15 pm **(#3)**

Tas_mania wrote:

Thats too bad Wallace. I wonder how your windows install coped with a new motherboard? Did you have to re-activate or did it just accept it?

I purchased a physical copy of windows 8.1,
back before Win10 was offered for free.
I've been using win10 since it's release.
I used the same product key and Microsoft Account,
when installing win10 on the new hardware.
Didn't run into any issues activating it.

I kept all my data away from the windows drive.
So I simply did a fresh install of win10 from USB,
with minimal loss.

lylejk · **Joined:** Sep 24, 2010 **Posts:** 12531

Yeah; once you registered (by creating a Microsoft account) your Win10 system, should you have to re-install your OS on that platform, Win10 will work as registered; big improvement over past re-install processes. Had to re-install an OS for a friend who's HD got hosed. I replaced it with a solid state drive (happened a bit over a year ago). His system is 5 times faster due to the SD drive. Really thinking about replacing my own drive with an SD, but haven't bit the bullet yet.

Anyway, glad you're back up and running, Wallace.

racer-x · **Joined:** Apr 15, 2017 **Posts:** 1826

You ought to through Linux on that old Dell OptiPlex 745 Mini Tower and give it new life. My wife uses something similar running Linux and it runs great, not too slow at all. It's an old Dell desktop at least 12 years old. She would have problems when it had Windows and I got tired of fixing it, so I installed Linux on it and now never have to mess with it again.

Wallace · **Posted:** Wed Jan 15, 2020 9:04 pm **(#6)**

lylejk wrote:

Yeah; once you registered (by creating a Microsoft account) your Win10 system, should you have to re-install your OS on that platform, Win10 will work as registered; big improvement over past re-install processes. Had to re-install an OS for a friend who's HD got hosed. I replaced it with a solid state drive (happened a bit over a year ago). His system is 5 times faster due to the SD drive. Really thinking about replacing my own drive with an SD, but haven't bit the bullet yet.

Anyway, glad you're back up and running, Wallace.

Thanks Lyle.
I'm using MVMe M.2 drive for the OS and a second one just because.
Things are running pretty quickly across the board.

racer-x · **Joined:** Apr 15, 2017 **Posts:** 1826

I'm running SSD dives on my desktop ant both laptops. The speed difference is amazing even on my 9 year old laptop. The drives are real cheap now, so no excuse not to upgrade.

Wallace · **Posted:** Wed Jan 15, 2020 9:11 pm **(#8)**

racer-x wrote:

You ought to through Linux on that old Dell OptiPlex 745 Mini Tower and give it new life. My wife uses something similar running Linux and it runs great, not too slow at all. It's an old Dell desktop at least 12 years old. She would have problems when it had Windows and I got tired of fixing it, so I installed Linux on it and now never have to mess with it again.

That is an option a lot of people do go with.
This isn't to say, that I haven't used Linux.

sallyanne · **Posted:** Thu Jan 16, 2020 12:56 am **(#9)**

Glad your up and running again Wallace.
This didn't happen to your custom built pc did it? That must have been a dreadful blow.

Wallace · **Posted:** Thu Jan 16, 2020 1:22 am **(#10)**

sallyanne wrote:

Glad your up and running again Wallace.
This didn't happen to your custom built pc did it? That must have been a dreadful blow.

Yes it was the custom built.
I was highly disappointed in the motherboard's failure.
I'm glad I kept a "reliable" backup computer and also backups of all my data.
It all still looks the same,
except for the motherboard and a fresh windows install.
It took about 4 days total before I was "back on the road".
Once I got the replacement board in my hands.
It only took a short while to get things going again.

Wallace · **Posted:** Thu Jan 16, 2020 2:05 am **(#11)**

racer-x wrote:

I'm running SSD dives on my desktop ant both laptops. The speed difference is amazing even on my 9 year old laptop. The drives are real cheap now, so no excuse not to upgrade.