Three hours to find a loose screw on a motherboard mount

I was working on a custom build for a client last Tuesday, and the thing would not post. No beeps, no video, just fans spinning. I swapped the RAM, tested the PSU with a multimeter, reseated the CPU twice. After two hours I was ready to throw it out the window. Finally I noticed the board was sitting just a little crooked in the case. One of the standoffs was missing a screw, so the board was grounding out on the case panel underneath. Took me three hours total for a fix that took thirty seconds. Has anyone else spent way too long on a simple hardware issue like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

jessica_hall499d ago

Three hours on a loose screw? That's rookie numbers, try a whole weekend chasing a BIOS setting that was literally right there in plain sight. Sometimes the simple stuff is the hardest to spot.

fox.derek9d ago

Was the setting something obvious like disabling the fast boot or did you have to dig through the advanced menus, @jessica_hall49? I've definitely been there where I overlooked a checkbox for hours.