Aurora Hardware Failure
My main PC for many years was a true classic, an HP Blackbird 002. I got it back in 2008 while I was living in Singapore. At the time it was about the hottest system you could buy. Of course over the years PC's got better and faster. Rather than replacing it, I upgraded it to keep state of the art. In 2012 I replaced the motherboard, the graphics card and added a solid state drive for the system disc (with a lot of help from my friend Ivan). Four years later I upgraded the graphics card again. All that time my Blackbird performed reliably. Sadly in 2021 I finally had a serious hardware problem, made worse when Ivan and I tried to fix it. The story did have a happy ending however. I was eventually able to fully repair the Blackbird, although it took me several months to do it. I couldn't be without a PC for that long so I broke down and got a new Alienware Aurora r13. I still keep the Blackbird operational but don't really use it for anything. It's kind of like an old champion race horse which is turned out to pasture after a long and successful career.
The motherboard is buried way down in there
My new Aurora was fast and much quieter than my old Blackbird. It handled my two large displays easily. I was very happy with it. Then one day in June, a message popped up from an Alienware utility that I needed to update some software. I didn't even pay attention to what it was updating. I just hit ok. The software installed and then I rebooted...and my system never came back. If I pushed the power button it would light up and the fan would come on for about two seconds and then it would completely shut down. It wasn't even doing a POST. Not good.
Whenever something bad happens after doing a software update I get suspicious. Now I wished that I had looked more closely. Had one of the updates been to the BIOS? It's possible that if that went wrong it could have caused the problem I was seeing. I couldn't reinstall the old BIOS version since I couldn't power up the PC, but there is a way to restore all BIOS settings to their factory default settings by moving a jumper on the mother board. It was worth a try.
I opened up the case and found the jumper. It was easy to reach...if I didn't have a big, two-slot graphics card in the way. It would be a lot more work to pull that out. Sandy came to the rescue. Her fingers are much more slender than mine and she was able to reach in with a pair of tweezers and move the jumper and then move it back. I was impressed. Apparently my computer was not impressed though because it didn't fix the problem. I obviously had a serious hardware failure. I suspected that I would have to send the Aurora back to Dell to get it fixed. I had the foresight to keep the box that it shipped in but it meant I would probably be without my PC for a month. It would be tough to survive that long on just my laptop.
I called Alienware tech support. The guy walked me through some troubleshooting steps. He had me disconnect all external devices: bluray drive, monitors, webcam, speakers, mouse, keyboard and network. It was possible that the problem was in one of those devices and it was shorting out a power line, causing the power supply to shut down. Nope. That wasn't it. He even had me go inside the case and disconnect the second hard drive. That surprised me. I guess Dell figures that Alienware customers are fairly PC savvy. Turned out that wasn't the problem either. I was ready to dig out the shipping box but the guy surprised me again. He said that they would ship a new power supply to Boise and a local person would pick it up and come to my house to install it. Wow. Onsite service. I wasn't expecting that.
Getting everything out of the way
Sure enough, on the scheduled day, a tech named Joire came out to the house. Turns out he worked for a company called Worldwide Techservices that provided support locally for Dell systems, as well as many others. That's what their business is. They have tech support people all around the world and contract to do work for various companies. That made sense because I couldn't see Dell having service people locally. Joire said he did quite a bit of work on Dell PC's and was very familiar with them. He double checked all the things that I had tried with the guy on the phone and got the same result. That narrowed it down. Unless it was something really unusual, it was either the power supply or the motherboard. The guy I had talked to on the phone bet on the power supply. The PSU is cheaper to replace than the mobo, a lot easier to swap out and more likely to fail than the motherboard. Of course that reasoning didn't matter to my computer and replacing the power supply didn't fix the problem. Joire updated my support ticket and pretty soon I got an email from Dell saying they were shipping me a new motherboard and someone would come out the following week to install it. In the meantime Sandy and I took a trip to Stanley so it didn't matter that I had to wait a little longer to get my PC back up and running.
This time the tech who came out was named Todd. It was a lot more work to swap out the motherboard but he seemed to be very familiar with the Aurora and he didn't have any problems. I had my PC set up on the table in the game room so there was a lot of room to work. I had my monitor, keyboard and mouse in there and as soon as he finished the swap we plugged everything in and powered it on. It came up right away. Todd had to enter a serial number into the BIOS and then the system seemed to be fine. I thanked him for his work, and after he left I moved the Aurora back into the office and hooked everything up again. I had missed having my PC. I hadn't played Battletech for three weeks.
Unfortunately there was still a minor problem. I couldn't get Windows to activate. That meant I couldn't do any personalizations or modifications to the system. I tried everything I could in Windows Settings. I googled the problem and followed all the troubleshooting articles that I could find. I was supposed to be able to transfer the license that my system had previously to the new hardware (the motherboard has the system ID) but I couldn't get it to work. I had to call tech support again. I figured it would be simple. All they had to do was give me an activation code and I would be all set.
Or not. The guy I got said that they had to send me a new motherboard. That seemed ridiculous. The guy on the phone didn't inspire confidence. He kept going offline for long periods, probably looking things up or asking someone else. His explanations didn't make much sense. I was skeptical enought that I called back a few hours later and complained that there had been a mistake, scheduling a motherboard replacement when all I needed was a code. This time the guy I got was a lot more knowledgeable. He explained that the activation code is in hardware on the motherboard and the only thing they could do was replace it. That seemed crazy to me but hey, they were the ones paying for it.
Ready to make the swap
By now we were into July. This time Joire came back the day after the fourth and swapped out the motherboard (again). I wanted to be sure everything worked before he left so I brought everything back into my office and connected it up. The system powered up but the monitor stayed blank. Oh, oh.
It took about a half hour to figure it out. I had connected the Aurora to both of my displays, but we only powered one on because we didn't need two screens to check that it worked. Turns out the BIOS doesn't handle multiple monitors very well. One was on HDMI and the other was on DVI. It gave priority to the DVI monitor but that was the one that wasn't turned on. The screen we were looking at stayed blank while the computer was trying to display something on the monitor that was powered off. Once we turned on the second monitor, everything was fine. And this time, Windows activated automatically right away. Following the tradition that we had in the IT group at the U of I, I immediatly proclaimed it a "Qapla'!!!" I was impressed that Joire understood my comment.
So I am back in business again. My system is as good as new. I was impressed that Dell had on site repair. I was also impressed that their support system worked so well, always sending me updates so I knew what was going on. I was a little disappointed that my PC died after only five months, but there is always some failure rate. I was probably just unlucky. It can't happen very often because the whole episode had to be very expensive for Dell. A brand new power supply, not one but two new motherboards, three onsite technician visits, each one an hour long plus travel time, and an hour on the phone with support people. It had to cost them around two thousand dollars to fix my system and I didn't have to pay anything.
Now that my Aurora is healthy and happy again, I'm surfing the web, doing email and writing this blog post. And now that I've finished it, I'm going to play Battletech.
