To taint the clickbait, it of course did not take them 3 years:<p>> I’ve recently been trying to resurrect my old PC. I haven’t used it at all over the last 3 years and moved twice in the meantime
I went through something similar building my first PC. I had worked a summer job just to be able to afford one, researched all the parts obsessively, and slowly waited for all of the parts to be shipped to rural Alaska. I put the all of the components in the case, flipped the PSU switch, pressed the power button, and -- nothing, not even a BIOS screen. Five red LEDs were lit on the motherboard, indicating a major hardware fault: CPU, motherboard, RAM, or PSU. Well, there was nothing else for it but to start replacing the parts one by one to see what was broken. It would take a day or two to get the Return Merchandise Authorization, and two weeks shipping time in either direction, so every month or so I would get a new part in to try to get this machine to work.<p>That went on for about five months. I was crazed with frustration, and a growing pile of electronics boxes, tools, and testing devices filled the corner of my room. I had a collection of components which I was sure were working: the system at least appeared to boot to BIOS when lying on the workbench, but when all the parts were hooked up inside the case, we got five red lights again: major hardware fault. Finally, at the limits of my frustration, I turned to my brother for aid: "It works on the bench, but not in the box. I don't know why. You figure it out."<p>He returned not five minutes later with the widest grin you can imagine. I was incredulous, and this was a better practical joke than he could ever have devised. He showed me that having the case's reset button (correctly) connected to the motherboard caused the error condition. I was so thankful that I almost didn't want to strangle him!
> This is not a story about CPU soldering or whatever hardware engineers find sexy<p>Guess I should dig out my old writeup of blowing up the floppy drive I needed to boot my PC by dropping a pencil in it, and the ensuing repair..
The I/O shields behind the PCs don't fit well, can cut you and are really bad design. Glad that new (premium?) motherboards have them integrated. <a href="https://laurentschoice.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/io-1.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://laurentschoice.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/io-1.j...</a>
I also have a very odd issue which I think has its root in the underlying firmware. I have an Dell Latitude E6520 notebook with a Intel Core i7 Sandy Bridge processor. Though I bought this laptop in 2013, it is still fast and works quite well even with Visual Studio / ReSharper.<p>Only one thing, it is sluggish as hell. Mouse clicks not responding, everything feels slow. Except when I undock it from the docking station and redock it again. Then you feel the fan spinning up, the CPU doing work, and everything becomes smooth. I checked the clock speed, its the same before and after docking.
There is nothing keeping the CPU busy either. Its like something is somehow preventing the system from executing efficiently until the system is re-docked.<p>The solution? I don't know, I might never find out. I will just keep redocking my laptop every time I boot Windows.