My Dad is “one of my clients”…as most of our family members are. Last Monday, I received a frantic call stating that he had no video signal. He had tried rebooting, then proceeded to “insert the boot disk and back up the C: drive, and press OK, Next, and Enter to several prompts……” at which point I smacked myself in the head. Long story short, I dropped by the house the next day. As I suspected, the add-in video card was fried- A clearing of the CMOS, plugging in to the onboard video and all was well. He was most concerned about data loss, but both of the HDDs were fine (single primary, and hidden backup drive). Here’s the card up close:
While yes, I did replace the fan on this card, I’m not convinced that was the primary cause of…..the root cause:
Severe capacitor failure!!! He had mentioned hearing a very loud ‘POP’ sound prior to losing video…clearly this was the cause. The replacement card should arrive on Friday.