motherboards

Can you trust a motherboard for $59? Leo says that it depends. Gigabyte, Asus, Acer are all good brands, and they're also very affordable. PC Perspective likes MSI and they're around that price.

Frank is having trouble getting his PC to boot up. He's replaced the power supply, but it still doesn't work. Leo says if there's no power on self-test (three beeps), and the fans are coming on, then it's likely a dead motherboard. Can he just replace the CPU without the motherboard or vice versa? Leo says if the power supply is eliminated as a culprit, then Frank could try replacing the processor and see what happens. But before he does that, he should pull all the USB devices and see if they're the culprit. It could be a short in his USB hub. There's so many possibilities.

John wants to know if he can reactivate Windows after replacing the Motherboard. Leo says he probably can. He'll just have to contact Microsoft and tell them what he's had to replace, and they will understand and authenticate. If he replaced more than half the computer, they may take issue. But with just replacing the motherboard, he should be able to get it authenticated. Windows may reject him when he tries, but then he can just contact Microsoft.

Bret has to constantly change the time on his computer because it keeps going back to another time zone. Leo says that he'll need to go into the settings and look for the time zone for his area. For New Jersey, it would be UTC-5. If the problem still perstists, then it could be a dying battery of the motherboard. That battery looks like a coin.

Brad built a computer running Windows and now it just shuts down while he's still using it. Leo says it sounds like a bad power supply. Brad replaced it, though. Leo says that's the downside of building his own machine -- he'll have to hunt down the problem himself. Leo suspects that since the power supply didn't fix it, the motherboard is probably the culprit. It could have been from a power surge. He should try replacing the battery for the BIOS and see if that resets it. If that doesn't work, it could be the motherboard. The next thing to address would be the CPU.

Ryan has an HP computer and it came up with a black screen. He tried to swap out the power supply, video card, removed all the USB peripherals, replaced the CMOS battery, and still has a black screen. He can hear the power supply running, and the fans are spinning up. Leo suspects it may be just a bad motherboard. Since Ryan has done all the easy stuff first, and then tried replacing peripherals, that only leads to the main motherboard. He should also listen for POST codes to see if the machine is letting him know something is wrong.

Kevin's RAM was failing so he put it into another channel and it worked. Leo says the motherboard manual will show him how to install RAM and sometimes he'll need to put the RAM in pairs. A slot may be bad.

Should he build a whole new machine? Would it be faster? Leo says that it may not. But if he fixes the motherboard, it might. SSDs are probably fine to keep. The chatroom says that the memory should still work, just not in dual channel.

Myrna replaced her motherboard a few months ago and now it's dead. Dell says it's out of warranty (90 days only), so she wants a local repair facility to deal with it. Leo suggests going to Yelp in her area to look at reviews.

Ollie has a Sony computer with a motherboard that went bad. His brother has a similar model and he's wondering if he can put it in his computer or take the hard drive out. Leo says that Windows will see it as a different computer and he'll have to reactivate Windows. He'll also need to install new drivers.