[Article] ASRock Z68 Extreme4 board died!

Remember I was telling that there were some minor issues with the motherboard? It seems that they really were clues to what was to become. Last night, I diagnosed my motherboard as dead. 

Let me explain what happened. 

Yesterday I came back from work and used the PC for a little while. Then I went out with my wife. The PC was working fine till then. I pushed the power button and left the house. I didn't wait for it to turn off completely. For some reason, it takes quite a bit of time to shutdown. When I came back home, I felt something was not right. The PC was powered up. The display was off. I turned the display on, but it didn't come alive. There was no signal. But the PC was powered up as the power LED and fans were running. I pressed the reset button. Nothing. I pressed the power button. Nothing. I pressed and held the power button. Nothing. So I pulled the plug from the wall and plugged it back. The PC turned ON alright. I could go into the desktop. And then, all of a sudden, the PC turned OFF. This happened few times. Even when I had the "Automatically Restart" at System Failure option unchecked, it still didn't give a BSOD. Just power off. Not even a restart. 

iReboot: Select the OS you want to boot next

At work, I have two PCs. One for development. One for documentation work. (basically, non-development related work.) Since the displays that are connected to both of those PCs have pretty small resolution for today's standards - 1280x1024, I have connected both if them to the development PC. Thus the general purpose PC does not have a display.

You must be wondering, how do I do any work on the general purpose PC. I simply remote login to that PC from the development PC using inbuilt Remote Desktop Connection.

Now, I have two OSes in the general purpose PC. Windows 7 32bit and Windows 7 64bit. Why? Because sometimes I use it to test certain things, not just documentation related work. There are times that I need to switch between the OSes. I can switch between them from the boot menu alright, but without the display, I cannot really do that without making a mistake. Disconnecting a display from the development PC and connecting it to the general purpose PC and vise versa is not something you would have to do in the 21st century, right?

 

But there is hope.