Basic Hardware Troubleshooting
Hardware troubleshooting is a scary thing. No one wants to admit their computer is broken, and having to do it at all means you’re having to take that as a basic assumption. Luckily, when you get down to it, it actually isn’t nearly as complicated as it seems.
Basically, a computer at it’s most basic level is only 5 components.
1) The Power Supply
– This is a very very important step. You do not want to scrimp on your power supply. Unfortunately, most of the ones that you’ll see bundled with cases, especially cheap cases, aren’t particularly great. And if your power supply fails, the unstable power going to your components could fry your entire computer if left unchecked. If you suspect you have hardware issues at all, this is the FIRST thing to replace. You can get a fairly high quality one at newegg for under 30$, use ratings as your guide, and see what people have to say about it.
2) The Motherboard
– This is, in fact, the main part of your computer. It determines what you support, what you can plug in, what kind of RAM you can have, what kind of CPU you can have, it has dozens of bits that allow things like sound, video, your keyboard, mouse, usb ports, speakers, power button, and basically everything else that doesn’t have specific hardware is built-into it. If it turns out you have to replace it, you’ll also probably want to replace your CPU, RAM, and possibly video card as well.
3) The CPU
– Widely regarded as the definitive aspect of the computer. The CPU is a chip that sits in the motherboard, that does all of the actual Work of making things go. The CPU may contain one or more “cores” which each singlemindedly performs a series of tasks that manipulate data. All the software on your computer has to be processed by your CPU in order to do anything.
4) RAM
– This is your computer’s memory. Everything the CPU does is fed back and forth out of RAM, and it is vitally important that it be 100% reliable. A single byte coming back wrong could throw off an entire stream of calculations that send your system careening into the pits of hell, spewing out garbage and complete nonsense, sending streams where they don’t belong, and generally making things unusable.
5) The Hard Drive(Or other input device)
– Your RAM, though very vital to the operating of your system, can’t actually store any information if there isn’t power running to it. That’s why whenever your computer powers on, it has to go through a pre-programmed set of instructions that has to find something to actually make your computer DO something. This is where your hard drive comes in. It stores permanent data that exists between powered states, and makes sure that when your computer starts up, it has something to work with. Technically this could be anything that performs the same function. A knoppix CD for example, or a floppy drive. Back in the olden days of computers, you would have a base system coded onto a computer chip in Read-Only-Memory, and if you wanted anything to last, you would have to have floppy disks with your changable data on it. There were even computers that had entire operating systems on floppy disks, and every time you booted up, you would have to load them one at a time, a painstakingly slow process.
Anyway, these five devices are all you need to have a working computer. And one of the first steps in hardware troubleshooting is to disconnect everything else and see if it works.
The FIRST step however, unless you have a spare power supply handy, is to confirm that you aren’t dealing with a software issue. This can be done quite easily and effectively with a Knoppix CD. Simply boot the computer using Knoppix. If you have no issues, you’re not dealing with a hardware issue. Congratulations! The worst case scenario is that you now have to do a full destructive restore on your computer, losing all your data in the process…you may want to make a backup first while you’re here.
However, we’ll assume you are still having problems. Your next step is to determine whether your RAM is faulty. The Knoppix CD actually has a memtest function that you can use as a boot option. Simply type “memtest” at the prompt when you first start the computer.
Let it run for awhile. I have heard that you have to let it get to 100% several times before you really know your RAM is okay, but the one time I have had it come back bad, it was very very very consistent, with errors on every test iteration at a specific point. So don’t be afraid to quit it early if you haven’t been able to get a new power supply yet, every time a test iteration gets to 100%, it’s checked that particular test across all of your RAM. there are literally hundreds of tests that it will run if you let it to make sure everything is completely capable.
At this point, you know whether you are dealing with a hardware or a software issue. It is at this point that if you are not completely comfortable with modifying your computer that you will probably want to hand this off to a computer repair technician. If you go further, it is very easily possible for you to do something stupid and completely destroy your computer. I take absolutely no responsibility for making sure you know everything you need to to keep this from happening, and I CERTAINLY take no responsibility if it does. If your computer works beautifully afterward, I will of course happily take all the credit.
If you are dealing with a software issue, the sure-fire solution that will fix all software-related issues is to reinstall your operating system. This will completely destroy everything on your computer, and be as though you had bought a brand new one. You will have no data left that you did not preserve in some way. So you will lose all pictures, documents, programs, software, texts, downloads, literally everything that, to you, probably makes your computer your computer. There will also likely be several steps that you will have to complete afterward in order to get your fresh computer into a fully functional state, such as installing drivers, updates, and configuring various items. But that’s not what this article is about.
If you are dealing with a hardware issue, it’s time to start messing with things. Your first step can be to unplug everything in your computer that isn’t absolutely required to function. The video card, sound cards, peripherals, USB devices, PCI devices, ethernet cable, keyboard, mouse, hard drive, everything except for your CD drive, RAM, CPU, and power leads. This has a very specific purpose. It eliminates possible problems. Now that we have nothing left other than the five items lifted above, if you still have a problem, the problem has to be with one of those five items.
If your problem is resolved, plug stuff back in one by one until it starts breaking again. Problem identified! Note that it could also be that your power supply is providing insufficient power. Which brings us to the next step.
At this point, if we’re still having a problem, it’s time to start replacing things. Until now, all of our troubleshooting has been perfectly free, you’ve done all the stuff you’d otherwise be paying for, just poking things around and trying stuff. Once we go down this path however, it is easily possible that you will not find the problem until you wind up essentially buying and assembling a new computer out of parts. Just what order you should start replacing things in is largely a matter of intuition, experience, and a complicated assessment of just what the computer is doing under the hood.
That said, you should replace the power supply first.
A bad power supply can easily destroy your fledgling computer as you’re building it piece by piece, and you do not want to spend hundreds of dollars buying new parts only to find out that they’ve broken in exactly the same way as the previous ones were.
Also, you probably don’t want to replace the CPU or the RAM unless you’re sure that they’re the problem. Both of these are intimately tied in with the motherboard, and if you have to wind up replacing the motherboard, your choice of CPU and RAM will change dramatically, so you’d just be wasting your money buying new parts for it.
And, of course, if at any point knoppix DOES work, you are left with the components that are missing from the equation when knoppix is involved. Namely the hard drive. You can perform various file-checking functions on the disc to check for integrity, and if a reinstall doesn’t work, you may just need to replace it.
You may have noticed by now that we’ve actually eliminated everything. Your hard drive isn’t connected, your power supply has been replaced, the memtest from knoppix indicates whether your RAM, and CPU are good or not, and your hard drive has been completely removed from the picture thanks to knoppix. Our only possibilities left are an operating system problem, perhaps knoppix just doesn’t work on your computer, and your old one was just broken to the point of needing replacement. A bad CD drive, causing knoppix to malfunction, while anything could be messing with your base OS. Or a bad motherboard, necessitating replacement of the CPU and RAM as well.
You can try a reinstall of the operating system, perhaps with a verified known working CD and hard drive just to be sure(see if it works when connected to another computer), and if that still fails, you’re pretty much looking at buying a new computer, either in parts or wholesale.
