Hi guys

I mentioned before that I am an experienced electronics repair engineer, but never tried to fix computer boards before apart from a couple HDD controllers

I was given couple of faulty Fujistsu Siemens Celcius tower PCs that would not POST so thought I would spend some time looking at them just to gain some experience

I'm please to say I got both of them working 😀

The main problem was faulty caps on both motherboards (one had 2 faulty the other 4). The were visibly bulging. I changed these and also desoldered a few others at random but the ones that looked good also tested fine on my capacitance and esr meters so I put those back in.

Once i got the mobos to POST I then had an intermittent problem of the Phoenix bios giving beep codes 4-2-3-3 which some googling said was to do with the graphics cards. After quite a bit of messing about I pinned it down to corroded or bad connectors in the PCI-e slots. in fact one mobo will only work reliably with the graphics card in the second PCI-e at the moment.

Next the PC was crashing as soon as I tried to start windows from either an XP or Win7 installation CD. Had to turn AHCI off in the bios then I could install XP. Win 7 is still proving troublesome to install but I had One PC working so could then use that to prove all the parts from the other one.

So I'm really quite pleased with myself today. Some useful skills and knowledge learned.

Here are some pics. By the way this is my current workshop, I thought some of you may be interested to see it. As you can see it's only about 7m square so 'compact' is a good description!. More of a cupboard than a room 🤣. I'm moving to a larger one 28m square in a few weeks as I want to be able to take on more work.

Rich