A lady at work gave me a system that her brother patched together for her to get her by until she could get a new machine. This was a hideous beast composed of an EliteGroup K7S5A Pro mobo, 1.15 ghz AMD Athlon processor, 256 MB PC 2100 RAM, and a Radeon 9200 Pro AGP video card (overkill) all in a broken, sideless, void-filled case.

She told me that she had been having problems with the system rebooting itself (virus?) but a new HDD fixed this problem. However, lately the system would freeze up on boot. This, combined with her son's desire to play higher end games, inpsired her to get a new system with her tax RETURN money.

Always willing to take free hardware, I took the machine home to see what I could do with it. When I booted the system for the first time at my house, I expected to see a billion programs running on start up. Much to my surprise, there were few programs running and the machine responded VERY well considering what was under the hood.

I tried investigating the cause of the freeze ups by first scanning the memory for problems using MS Memory Diagnostic. The RAM came back error free. Next, I scanned the HDD using SeaTools. I again found no issues.

I ran a virus scan, both at boot time and in Windows and only found a few adware hits, which was surprising considering she was not running any real time protection.
The next day I told her about how the system worked just fine for me. She responded that her brother said the same thing. I asked her if she had been online during these freeze ups and she said that she was. Neither I, nor her brother, were. We are hypothesizing that the freeze ups may be RELATED to her Belkin router, not the PC itself.

My next step was to free the system from its unsightly enclosure. A friend had an unused case that although broken itself, was leaps and bounds better than the current. I removed the mobo and video card and dusted them with some air. I am surprised that the GPU fan could even spin for all the dust that was in there.

Upon further inspection of the mobo and video card, I noticed some brown crusty spots scattered here and there. It looks as though someone at some time had spilled Coke or another dark soda on the board and it had dried and crusted. I am going to assume that the substance had dried before the next power up, as I can't imagine a mobo surviving a liquid contact while in use.

I have been trying to clean the boards with 91% alcohol, toothpicks, and a toothbrush. It is not easy. Should I even bother? If I can get it clean and get everything put back into a case, what do I do next? How do I make sure that this substance did not cause any permanent damage to the mobo, CPU or video card? Is there a mobo/CPU reliability TEST out there? What about for video cards?

Should I just chuck this thing or what?

I really don't care so much about the mobo, but I would like to consider selling the Radeon 9200 if I can be sure that it is in GOOD operational condition. It will also need to look good. I can't sell a card to someone with soda (?) on it.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

PKLiquid and electronics is a bad combination.
There is no definite way to make sure the hardware haven't been damaged. The best you can do is to stress the hardware, by doing benchmarks for example. Maybe some of the older versions of 3DMark.
But you're saying the computer is not freezing at the moment?

The Radeon 9200 was a budget card when it was new. What can you get for a budget, used 4-5 year old card? 10 bucks? I wouldn't waste my time cleaning that thing.Well, in the 3 hours that i had the system running with virus scans, RAM test, and HD tests, no, there were no freeze ups.

I meant 9700, not 9200. Does that matter?

Someone suggested dielectric contact cleaner.

PKQuote from: Allochthonous on February 12, 2008, 03:31:40 PM

I meant 9700, not 9200. Does that matter?