Customer has a PC that sometimes won’t power up… and sometime after powerup, the screen colours will shimmer, or be different to what they should be.

He also says that the CPU temperature is very high.

The CPU heatsink has a lot of dust on it… severely blocking the airflow from the fan. Some tweezers, and some fluff balls later, and the CPU is looking much cooler.

However, there are still some startup problems, and the system is very slow at booting.

There are no infections that I can see.

So I take it back to the office for a careful inspection.

Customer also gives me a “spare” motherboard, in case the motherboard ends up being faulty.

Anyway, there are lots of strange symptoms, so I decide to do some tests. everything is fine until the RAM tests.

The RAM test give some odd results. A dedicated RAM test gives more errors.

I put the RAM into another socket, and the memory problems are gone… The display is solid, and the PC is somewhat faster… But XP now wants to activate again… 🙁

And customer has lost his original XP CD… he has a few others, but none that match whats on this PC.

I manage to fix the activation problem, replace a faulty CDROM and ethernet card, and hand back a working PC.