At the weekend I was literally at the local council recycling centre, dumping a bag of small electronics bits in the "Small Electricals" dumpster, which happened to be full to the top already.
I was excited to see one or two PCs and parts within reach! I left a Dell P4 optiplex that had already been stripped of drives and RAM, but also saw some decent looking AM3 gaming motherboards right at the top, and grabbed the two that had escaped damage. Both had low end Sempron 145s installed, it turned out. So rather than gaming, I wonder if someone had used the many, many SATA channels on them for a CCTV controller or server or something?
Even more interesting, to me, was an HP Pavilion slimline PC, with AMD Phenom and Windows Vista stickers. It seemed complete, but was below the motherboards, so maybe had been there a little longer, and it had rained heavily early that morning and the day before. Still, I took it home.
I let it dry out for the day, then started stripping it down to assess the damage.
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Water inside was actually very limited - just where the case vents were, around the PCIe graphics card and the very top of the motherboard, around the (proprietary mini) ATX power header. Inside the PSU seemed mercifully totally dry. I let it dry out a bit more opened up, and gave it a blast with a hairdryer too.
After another few hours, there was no perceptible moisture at all. So tested it. Fan and lights, but no beeps, no video. Figured it was dead, and started stripping / testing the components. HDD, GPU, Blu-ray drive, and RAM all worked in other systems. I don't have any other AM2 systems to test the CPU though.
Tried putting the minimum back in - just CPU and memory - but even less life 😔 Just a momentary spin of the fan and back off. So, I figured it was dead.
Another 24 hrs later, I thought I'd give it one final test, before packing it up to go back to the tip. And who'd have thought it - this time POST with video! (Still no beep - buzzer might be dead?)
So, it lives! And it's a cute little slightly bigger than ITX system, which I'm tempted to keep! The two slots, PCIe x16 and PCI, seem like a bit of a sweet spot - is there a name for this form factor?
I guess there was still some water somewhere (inside the ATX connector or even inside the CPU socket) that was causing a short and sending it straight into safety shut down?
Is there anything else I should do avoid corrosion?