“In two decades, I have only ever found five faulty CPUs. Was this faulty CPU #6?”
The tears flow as a celebratory cake is slapped away by a fault that never happens. Plus: how many security products can be bought by accident?
Last December, our computer repair shop almost celebrated 20 years of business. We don’t get excited about anniversaries, but two decades seemed cake-worthy – until fate served a helping of humble pie instead. I’ve previously written about the shadowy spectre of Hubris that hides within each repair, ready to slap down techies who believe (if only for a second) that they’re mastering the art of fixing. During the week of our anniversary, Hubris arrived three times to run amok. I’ll save two of the tales for a rainy day and leave you with this. If you want me, I’ll be the one in the corner, crying.
Mark’s PC was a desktop built by an online retailer a few years ago. They moulded it around a ninthgeneration Core i5 (Christopher Ecclestone) and an MSI H310 motherboard sporting 32GB of RAM. Mark reported two issues. The first was that a certain game, the name of which is unimportant, crashed the machine. The second problem was that his recent purchases of RGB case LEDs and a spangly new LED rear fan wouldn’t light up.
Neither problem seemed serious, but of the two, the crashing game was the more troublesome. When diagnosing potential gaming issues, I avoid (if possible) using the client’s own accounts as I don’t want to mangle their hard-earned scores or online reputation. Initially, I ignore software and focus on hardware. The prime suspects would be GPU, RAM, PSU and thermals, but it’s critical to keep an open mind as the evidence may point to other areas. What made Mark’s desktop tough to diagnose was that it wouldn’t start.
Mark hadn’t mentioned this, so I made the presumption that a power connector had popped off during transport. It hadn’t. A precautionary re-seat of RAM (another showstopping dislodgeable) didn’t help. Mark said that the machine had worked the previous day so clearly something had gone catastrophically wrong between his shutdown and my startup. Parking the gaming problem, I removed the SSDs for testing – mercifully they were alive – then placed them to one side. The machine also wouldn’t start when connected to our test PSU, so for good measure, I tested Mark’s PSU with Dr Power 2 ( tinyurl.com/354drpower). It’s an old tool for checking voltage basics and much easier than jabbing multi-meter probes into suspect sockets. Mark’s PSU received the all-clear from the good Doctor.
I’ve yet to mention Mark’s CPU cooler, a MasterLiquid ML120L V2
RGB AIO by Cooler Master. Its radiator and fan combo were hindering the access to the board, and only when it was removed did I spot two red lights on the MSI’s EZ debug LEDs. This was a good omen as it shows the board was trying to tell me something about RAM. From the toolbox I attached a mini-plug speaker ( tinyurl.com/354miniplug) and listened as the board sang a beepy song of RAM failure. Feeling positive, I pulled Mark’s RAM, plugged in a test stick of DDR4 and foolishly awaited the POST beep of success. My test RAM still beeped and the red EZ LEDs continued to twinkle. The same happened when I
“During the week of our anniversary, Hubris arrived three times to run amok”
swapped in a test GPU (as expected, but I had to be sure), so by a process of elimination, I could tell Mark that his motherboard had died. I’ll quickly mention the CPU for the sake of completeness, but as CPUs don’t go wrong, we’ll move on.
Board yet?
Although Mark’s Core i5 was a 2019 product, it used the Coffee Lake variation of Intel’s socket 1151 motherboard, and full marks to you if you can find a new one for prices that won’t bankrupt a small Yorkshire computer shop. Alison sourced a replacement, which we’d been assured was new, but clearly wasn’t. At this point, we were still in a diagnostic phase, so the costs of acquiring the board (and the labour) were all ours. As the clock was ticking, I took the “newsed” board and bolted Mark’s components into it. Still it beeped. I began swapping his parts for test components (even our test PSU re-appeared) and the beeping persisted. I cursed the newsed board for obviously being garbage when I realised that beneath the nest of temporary parts and cables strewn across the bench was only one of Mark’s components, the CPU, but it couldn’t be that as CPUs don’t go wrong, do they?
In two decades, I have only ever found five faulty CPUs. The binning process used by manufacturers means CPUs are robust components, so was this faulty CPU #6? Was the newsed board trash? Was it both? The beauty of having a repair shop is that I’ve squirrelled away used components to use as test units, but annoyingly I didn’t have a Coffee Lake 1151 CPU available. A Celeron G4930 arrived several days later, which enticed a single POST beep from the newsed board before bringing the display to life. I scanned the car crash of Mark’s parts, test parts and purchased parts littering my workbench, feeling as professional as Charlie Croker dangling over a cliff trying to reassure everyone with: “Hang on a minute, lads. I’ve got a great idea.”
Before I could speak to Mark, I needed to test his components with the new CPU, but as I’d gutted this entire (heavily cabled) machine, it took an unpleasantly long time to resolve, especially his LED problem. Mark had inadvertently bought three different standards of LED lighting. There was the 3-pin ARGB, which runs off 5V, 4-pin RGB (12V), and the new Corsair iCue fan wanted between 6V and 13V depending on setup. None of them is interchangeable.
Inside Rob’s case was a Cooler Master RGB generator, which produced the RGB signal for the cooler’s CPU hub and radiator fans. Mark’s new RGB LED strips worked well with it, but the Cooler Master
RGB generator is lights only, no fan power. That functionality came from an unbranded ARGB combi-box with multiple fan headers, but as we didn’t have any ARGB fans, this box was for muscle. Finally, the Corsair iCue uses a proprietary connector (why?) and, although it’s possible to buy an iCue to ARGB connector, we didn’t have one, so the Mark’s iCue fan spins (driven by the ARGB combi-box) but the lights are off. Obviously, I didn’t test the game as his PC was running a Celeron rather than an i5, but at least I could make a call to confirm that his CPU had died. Well done to you if you predicted this at the beginning. Somehow, Mark’s story isn’t over, but to save us all from more trauma, I’m going to speed it up.
As with the motherboard, finding a new Coffee Lake CPU is extremely tough, but Mark enthused about trawling eBay for a bargain refurbished i5 or i7. Cunningly, I’d re-wired his MasterLiquid RGB AIO cooler so I wouldn’t have to rebuild the infernal machine for a second time to swap a replacement. An hour later, Mark mentioned that he’d been thinking of an upgrade for a little while and instructed me to fit a new motherboard, CPU and SSD. As I took the snips to my carefully cable-tied creation, a tear rolled down my cheek and I noticed that Hubris had fingered the word “tawt” in the layer of dirt on the shop’s window.
The new kit arrived. An Intel i7-12700F (a Capaldi, which was fitting for the language being sprayed around the shop) inside an ASRock B660M motherboard. I chose this board as it would accept Mark’s DDR4, it has both ARGB and RGB headers and, with a BIOS update, it will accept 14th gen Intel chips (known as the Tennant_Agains).
Imagine a fast-paced montage where I pull Mark’s old, dusty components and fit gleaming replacements throbbing with newness and success. We’ll fastforward through the bit where I have to ditch Mark’s MasterLiquid RGB AIO CPU cooler as his previous vendor hadn’t supplied the Socket 1700 mount for it (I used the stock Intel), whiz past me re-jigging all the lighting for the third time in as many days, then slow for the crescendo as I hit the power button and absolutely nothing happens. After more fiddling, I worked out that Mark’s RAM was the fault.
At this point, I’d had enough of the damn thing and don’t mind admitting that I’d been hitting the coffee and Hobnobs with an unhealthy rapidity, propelling myself down the self-destructive road to hyperglycaemic oblivion.
But something in the back of my brain made me realise that the B660M motherboard was only serving 1.2V on the RAM sockets, and Mark’s older DDR4 needed 1.35V. Using my
“As I took the snips to my cable-tied creation, a tear rolled down my cheek”
faithful DDR4 test stick, I could manually tweak the BIOS, then swap in Mark’s DIMMs and, finally, the bloody thing finally powered up.
I cloned his boot SATA SSD to the new M.2 SSD, but something remained awry as Windows wouldn’t boot. I genuinely can’t tell you what happened next. David Bowie would retell that heavy cocaine use prevented him from recalling the recording sessions of his fabulous Station to Station ( tinyurl.com/ 354bowie) album, and due to the intoxicating effects of copious amounts of caffeine and multiple packets of chocolate-covered biscuits, I truly have no memory of how I resolved this boot problem, but I did.
Finally, I stuck the RGB LEDs around the front of the case and bolted the whole thing back together. Although it was past 9pm, I called Mark and, less than 15 minutes later, I was showing him around his rebuild with the clarity of a half-naked drunk man trying to appear sober despite being surrounded by empty lager cans and standing in a pool of liquid that definitely isn’t lager.
Two weeks later, I received an email from Mark. “A massive thank you is in need for all your help! Everything with my PC is working very well. Very pleased with it! Much faster and running games far better than I expected!” Despite the cruel machinations of Fate, Luck and Hubris, Mark clearly has a smile on his face. Looking somewhat more glum is our accountant because an analysis of the financials reveal that even if we disregard the hours of labour, when we balance the hardware costs of the unused 1151 board and the Celeron and the profit made on the i7, 1200 board and M.2 SSD, the job made a bumper pre-tax profit of just under £20. I asked Mark if I could include the story of his recalcitrant machine in
PC Pro as CPU failures are such a rare thing. His response: “Hi Dave, yes that is absolutely fine!” Dave? Pass me the biscuits...
A vast profit
How much are you paying for internet security? Do yourself a favour and check. It’s a task worth repeating with family members as recently we’ve encountered a few customers paying far more than they realised. The most eye-opening incident was Julia, a wonderful lady in her 80s who preferred an analogue life but was forced to tackle technology when her tech-loving husband passed away.
Julia was concerned about subscription messages that her Avast installation was throwing up. She was certain that she’d paid and it didn’t take long to discover that she had. Many, many times. She’d bought Avast Premium Security for a pleasing £23.88 but, this being the modern era, where taking out a subscription seems to give vendors the green light to bombard loyal customers with nagging upsell offers, it wasn’t the only package installed on the machine. There was Avast AntiTrack Premium, Avast CleanUp Premium and Avast SecureLine VPN, which totted up to a staggering £157.51. The issue was that despite having a large haul of subscriptions, Avast persists in launching ads masquerading as warnings that dark forces were tracking every click. Julia misunderstood the messaging, presumed her inexperience meant the online payment for her AV subscription had failed, and tried again.
Her payment history revealed she’d also bought Avast BreachGuard, which Avast helpfully flagged as being unused on any system. Total bill now £198.07. I don’t want you thinking Avast is ungenerous to its customers. Julia’s account displayed an advert offering her a free copy of Avast AntiTrack Premium, curiously placed above the subscription information for the same product for which she’d already paid £25. As Avast’s advert states, “Being subscribed pays off” – for whom is unclear.
Those familiar with Avast’s range may have spotted that Julia had somehow missed out on Avast Driver Update, which the company promotes as a fix for crashes and slow browsing. Experience has shown me that slow browsing due to out-of-date drivers is a much rarer occurrence than a machine bogged down with unwanted software accidentally installed by an inexperienced user.
Let me be very clear by saying that Avast has done nothing wrong. It has made an offer to a customer which has been (albeit unwittingly) accepted. Julia didn’t contact Avast for advice as she genuinely didn’t know what was happening. Although her annual Avast bill was almost £200, it was split into much smaller chunks across the year via credit cards and PayPal, making the real total hard to spot. On her instruction, we terminated all of Julia’s renewals, cancelled her payments and removed all the Avast products from her PC. Her browsing has never been speedier. Take a moment to review your own subscriptions, especially if you’ve been autorenewing for a few years. You may be paying more than you think.
“As Avast’s advert states, ‘Being subscribed pays off’ – for whom is unclear”
lee@inspirationcomputers.com