Success!

OK, I finally have a machine that runs. Yea!

Last night I called Fry's, told them what was up, and asked what was next. The associate on the phone sent me to the Returns department. The nice guy there, Chris, sounded like he had heard this one before, and said that they would have to verify that the part failed before they would take it back. I told him that I'd like to bring the machine in tomorrow morning. He said he would not be there, but the Returns department would be able to help me out.

So, I took the machine into the Returns department, told them about Chris, and they sent me to the Service department, where they told me that there would be a $90 charge and they would determine what the problem was. There would be an additional charge for the replacement part. I told him that I wasn't going to pay for them to determine that Fry's had sold me a bad motherboard and left. Then I headed for the Motherboard department.

In the Motherboard department, I got a more sympathetic reception. The guy looked at the machine, said that it looked like I put it together correctly, and then said that he couldn't help any further, except to tell me that Chris would be in at 2. I said I would be back.

After work, I returned to Fry's, headed directly back to Motherboards and asked for Chris. Unfortunately, no one knew where he was. While they looked for him, I looked at new motherboards. There didn't seem to be a replacement motherboard at a similar price, so if it was the motherboard, it was going to cost me some more money, a lot more money.

So, the mystical Chris was found, back in the Returns department! He remembered me from the night before and asked one of his Returns guys to try and figure out which component failed. We started with a demonstration of the problem. Then he put a tester on the power supply. No problems there. So we tried a known good PSU on the machine, and got the same behavior. Then we traded the VGA card, and got the same result. Then we tried known good memory, and still got the same result. At this point, Chris dropped in, got an update, and said it was hardly ever the CPU. Usually this was a problem with the motherboard. So, they asked me to go back and get a replacement board. I shrugged and headed back to the Motherboard department.

Back in Motherboards, I found a couple of cheap boards that would do, but they weren't ASUS boards. It didn't matter because they were all out of stock of these boards too, except for the Demo boards. I said that I wasn't going through that again, and picked up an ASUS Sabertooth 990FX Motherboard.

Back at Returns, we put my CPU, memory, graphics card and PSU into the new board, plugged in the monitor, flipped the PSU power switch. Fans whirred, lights blinked, the speaker beeped, and the monitor displayed the BIOS menu. Yea!

I spent sometime at the Returns desk putting the motherboard into the case and verifying that it still worked. Then I went to the checkout desk, paid the extra $100, and headed home.

I spent the rest of the evening installing the disk drives, routing the power cables better, and hooking the remaining case cables up to the motherboard. I then plugged in a USB keyboard, flipped the switch and was rewarded with a BIOS menu.

So, a some point while I was in the Motherboards department I was a sign that said that they would take any motherboard and power it up to the Power On System Test for $10. I wish I had seen that on Sunday. That would have been $10 well spent.

So next up, installing the O/S.