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Re: Windows 10 Update Destroyed My Desk-Top PC. Need Help.

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On Fri, 15 Jul 2016 19:38:27 -0500, Laurence F. Sheldon, Jr. wrote:

> PC went into a deep stall (it has been doing since the hard drive was
> replaced--I can't afford another service call).

 Did the service engineer not get it all working again?

> 
> So the next time I got control back I rebooted it.

 I'm not sure what you mean by "the next time I got control back". In 
what way did you "not have control"?

> 
> And Windows 10 Update took over!   On Friday!
> 
> And ran for a long time.

 Sadly for most victims, a fairly typical experience.

> 
> I wandered off and came back to see it stopped on the Dell logo screen.

 Interesting that it was stuck on that screen, That indicates that the 
POST procedure locked up. If it had hit a problem trying to reboot from 
the hard drive, that screen would have been replaced by either an error 
message or else a completely blank screen.

> 
> So I punched the power button (My wife's machine went through a spell
> where it would stop on a reboot until you pushed the power button).
> 
> Screen went blank but the disc activity light was on dimly.
> 
> After a while. I held down the power button to see if I could start a
> recovery boot of some kind.
> 
> No joy.

 There's a 4 seconds "watchdog timer" built into the chipset designed to 
over-ride the host OS control and allow you to force a power down. The 
usual method to power down via the on/off button when the system has 
locked up is to keep it pressed for the 4 second time-out period (count 
slowly to 5) until any and all indicator lamps extinguish (in this case 
that dimly glowing HDD activity lamp as well as the power indicator). If 
there's no change of lamp status when you've reached a count of 5, keep 
going for another two or three seconds to put the result in absolutely no 
doubt before pulling the plug.

 HDD activity indicator lamps can glow dimly as a result of rapid but 
brief accesses. Normally, you can see the lamp flickering if you observe 
it closely. If there's no hint of flicker and you're seeing a steady dim 
glow, chances are there's some sort of hardware fault (HDD, MoBo or PSU) 
which may have nothing to do with the windows upgrade/update process 
other than perhaps the extra strain triggering an incipient fault that 
may not have occurred for a few more hours or another day or so.

 I'm not entirely sure but ISTR that some models of Dell desktop PCs used 
Bestec PSUs which had a reputation (mostly witnessed by E-Machines PC 
owners about a decade ago) for overvolting the 5VSB line and slowly 
frying that bit of the MoBo responsible for monitoring the on/off button. 
This led to some rather strange symptoms before the MoBo completely 
failed. If you care to remove the case cover and take a peek at the ATX 
PSU, you may discover that it's a Bestec power supply which could be bad 
news for the MoBo (not all models of Bestec ATX psus suffered from this 
'Kamikazi" fault).

> 
> Been sitting at the Dell logo with dim disc activity light for a 1/2
> hour or more.

 If the HDD activity lamp has been glowing dimly without any hint of 
flicker for more than a minute, waiting any longer will be a complete 
waste of time and you may as well pull the plug.

> 
> Where might I find help?   That will work?   That I can afford?

 If you're lucky, it might simply be a (non fatal to the MoBo) PSU 
failure. My brother brought his windows 7 desktop PC to me just a few 
days ago on account the PSU overheated due to its fan finally failing to 
start up after Gawd knows how many months it had been starting up with 
very noisy symptoms of dried out fan bearings before the lubricant had 
heated up enough to stop "The Chatter" and let it get back up to normal 
speed.

 This was a machine I'd originally built for him about a decade ago with 
win2k installed. It's since been through a couple of hardware and OS 
upgrades (MoBo/CPU/RAM/HDD/SSD upgrades and winXP then win7) using the 
same case and PSU. Quite frankly, I'm surprised that *that* ATX PSU 
lasted as long as it did.

 Mind you, it may have lasted even longer if My Bro and SiL hadn't 
completely ignored the symptoms of impending fan failure and had asked me 
to fix the problem in a more timely fashion (I'd probably have swapped 
the PSU out rather than faff about oiling the fan bearings though).

 Despite the PSU going "Phut!" and generating smelly 'magic smoke', 
surprisingly, it hadn't blown the internal safety fuse and was still 
providing power to the 5VSB rail (keyboard/mouse sockets configured to be 
powered from the 5VSB rail provided this indication).

 Experience told me not to bother testing any further than disconnecting 
power to the drives to eliminate faults that could have presented an 
overload condition to the PSU so I substituted the highly suspect PSU 
with another known to be working one (SoP in such cases) which allowed 
the PC to spring back into life.

 Although Dell tends to use slightly bastardised dimensionally formatted 
variations on the 'Industry Standard' ATX PSU, it's usually possible to 
make a standard ATX psu fit with relatively minor mods to the case 
(usually just a bit of metal bending or tinsnips work) so you can avoid 
the over-priced "Dell Specials" and keep the repair costs down to a mere 
20 to 30 quid if you DIY it or else take it to a repair shop and pay for 
the half hour's worth of labour it usually takes (even when bending/
cutting metal to fit a standard ATX psu) plus the cost of the replacement 
PSU.

 Of course, your problem might down to any hardware failure (the symptoms 
strongly suggest hardware failure which could include yet another HDD 
failure as well as faults elsewhere). You need to do some more testing to 
determine which, if any, components have failed. In your case, it sounds 
like you need the services of an experienced technician to sort this one 
out for you.

 Alternatively (seeing as you're reluctant to shell out on another 
service call), if you have internet access from another machine (which 
appears to be the case), you could try googling for PC fault finding 
tutorials and have a go at locating the fault yourself. The symptoms, as 
described, don't appear to be the more usual software/driver issues that 
can arise with such windows updates/upgrades.

HTH & HAND.

-- 
Johnny B Good

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Windows 10 Update Destroyed My Desk-Top PC. Need Help. "Laurence F. Sheldon, Jr." <lfsheldon@gmail.com> - 2016-07-15 19:38 -0500
  Re: Windows 10 Update Destroyed My Desk-Top PC. Need Help. Johnny B Good <johnny-b-good@invalid.ntlworld.com> - 2016-07-16 02:39 +0000
    Re: Windows 10 Update Destroyed My Desk-Top PC. Need Help. "Laurence F. Sheldon, Jr." <lfsheldon@gmail.com> - 2016-07-16 01:28 -0500
      Re: Windows 10 Update Destroyed My Desk-Top PC. Need Help. Johnny B Good <johnny-b-good@invalid.ntlworld.com> - 2016-07-16 17:08 +0000
        Re: Windows 10 Update Destroyed My Desk-Top PC. Need Help. "Laurence F. Sheldon, Jr." <lfsheldon@gmail.com> - 2016-07-17 13:26 -0500
          Re: Windows 10 Update Destroyed My Desk-Top PC. Need Help. Bob Eager <news0006@eager.cx> - 2016-07-17 20:46 +0000
            Re: Windows 10 Update Destroyed My Desk-Top PC. Need Help. "Laurence F. Sheldon, Jr." <lfsheldon@gmail.com> - 2016-07-17 18:38 -0500
    Re: Windows 10 Update Destroyed My Desk-Top PC. Need Help. Larry Sheldon <lfsheldon@gmail.com> - 2016-07-22 14:34 -0500
  Re: Windows 10 Update Destroyed My Desk-Top PC. Need Help. British Rocket Group <no_email@invalid.invalid> - 2016-08-06 20:50 +0000

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