garethEds Posted March 24, 2011 Posted March 24, 2011 We are seeing an issue with some Stone Machines around 4 years old - out of warranty so Stone will not send an engineer. WOnder if anyone can help. We turn the machines on with the power button, two lights come on at the front and then the machine dies. Stone suggested we open them up, reseat everything, air blast etc, remove USB devices etc. All done but it's a no go. We tried changing the power supply in one machine with a working one but it still happened (so I guess we can rule out the power supply). Any ideas what else we can try? It seems to be happening a lot to Stone machines from this 4 year old period. Gareth
mb2k01 Posted March 24, 2011 Posted March 24, 2011 Firstly, I think the mention of Stone Computers will probably set off the usual "Stone are rubbish" / "Stone are great" discussion, so let me slot my 2p in by saying I don't think this is anything to do with brand, it will be a batch of components at fault if it is occuring en mass. Do you have any monitoring tools on them? If they are the intel boards do you have the intel util to monitor temp etc? My first thought based on a similar experience with legacy machines (which weren't Stone!) is that it may be processor temp related. We solved our issue by getting a decent thermal silver compound and reseating fans - in some of our cases the pc's either had too much paste or not enough! Going back to Stone... if you were really keen for them to have a hand in resolving the issue I dare say they would action an engineer to visit you on site for a chargable callout and investigate / repair one, but he would then be able to advise you of the problem for you to do repairs from that point on?
glennda Posted March 25, 2011 Posted March 25, 2011 Do you have any PCI Cards in them? We have a few random problems with the pci cards we have in ours (as they where dirt cheap) which causes the same behavior or restarting if its not sitting properly
AndyB4rks Posted March 25, 2011 Posted March 25, 2011 (edited) We had this exact problem and it turned out to be the power supply causing the fault, you can ask stone for a price for the power supply however it depends if the case in question is end of life or not as some of the sff cases you can no longer get power supplies for. Also we had some that turned out to be motherboard faults and in the end we just had to scrap these, also we had some faulty power switches that would stick causing it to turn the computer off. Hope some of this helps. Edited March 25, 2011 by AndyB4rks
sonofsanta Posted March 25, 2011 Posted March 25, 2011 If swapping the PSU doesn't solve it I can only think it's the mobo having problems with power... unfortunately the only way to really diagnose that is to test absolutely everything else in another working machine and do it via process of elimination. Motherboards are the worst component to diagnose by a fair stretch. If you have another (working) model with same components, swap in a single component at a time until everything that was in the broken machine has been proven to work in the working machine. Once you've eliminated every other possibility then you'll know it's the motherboard. Hopefully they're a CPU socket you can still get hold of!
Cache Posted March 25, 2011 Posted March 25, 2011 Don't think this will be the case as when it's happened to us there is no apparent life in the machine, but the USB ports on the front aren't damaged and shorting the connection are they? Like I say when this has happened to us the machine won't power on and the power light on the motherboard is normally flickering.
eejit Posted March 25, 2011 Posted March 25, 2011 That problem is normally a power supply issue but as you say, you've have changed the PSU. Was the new PSU beefy enough do you think?
jamesb Posted March 25, 2011 Posted March 25, 2011 You can pick up a PCI POST analyzer card fairly cheap, might be worth getting one of those and seeing if you can get a POST error. They're handy to have around anyhow. 4
difinity Posted March 25, 2011 Posted March 25, 2011 Leaking or bulging capacitors on the motherboard or a faulty cpu maybe ?
glennda Posted March 25, 2011 Posted March 25, 2011 Leaking or bulging capacitors on the motherboard or a faulty cpu maybe ? Are they intel boards? Didn't intel get a whole load of dodgy capacitors a few years back?
jamesb Posted March 25, 2011 Posted March 25, 2011 Are they intel boards? Didn't intel get a whole load of dodgy capacitors a few years back? I thought that was Dell and a few others, and quite a few years ago? I remember having to drive around with new motherboards to replace all of the blown ones.
difinity Posted March 25, 2011 Posted March 25, 2011 Are they intel boards? Didn't intel get a whole load of dodgy capacitors a few years back? I've seen recentish Gigabyte and Asus board also suffer from this problem, i've also seen the solid capacitors that aren't supposed to leak explode.
EvLPhenom Posted March 25, 2011 Posted March 25, 2011 We have had a bad batch of graphics cards on some of our older stone machines that caused odd behaviour with the machines. We had problems from them not booting to booting up completely but no sign of any graphics. Whip the card out and viola it worked fine. May be worth a shot. With these model of machines now we just remove the graphics card as they are out of warranty and use the onboard. hope this helps
Martin Posted March 25, 2011 Posted March 25, 2011 You can pick up a PCI POST analyzer card fairly cheap, might be worth getting one of those and seeing if you can get a POST error. They're handy to have around anyhow. Oooh, that sounds like a useful device - just found one at eBuyer - Startech PCI Post Diagnostics Test Card! Cheers, mb
bondbill2k2 Posted March 25, 2011 Posted March 25, 2011 We had the same issue on two of ours and replaced the PSU solved it so not sure what it is. Are you getting to POST even?
subjones Posted March 25, 2011 Posted March 25, 2011 Had a simular problem the pins on the USB socket short circuit.On the board I had you can unpluge the USB socket job don.
cpjitservices Posted March 25, 2011 Posted March 25, 2011 Stone - Yep good ole Stone we have hundreds of these - helps to take the lid of hold it upside and shake it lol could be some dust sitting under the board causing a short.
bondbill2k2 Posted March 25, 2011 Posted March 25, 2011 Had a simular problem the pins on the USB socket short circuit.On the board I had you can unpluge the USB socket job don. Had that aswell actually, thanks for the reminder! *adds it to problem knowlage database*
garethEds Posted March 28, 2011 Author Posted March 28, 2011 Thanks everyone for the ideas. We've tried everything and now believe it to be the motherboard. Richard (school technician) has taken everything out - cleaned it up and even reapplied some thermal compound to the processor in case it was the processor heating up. One of the machines has come back to life and has been up and running for the past two hours. The other machines are showing issues so I'll have a chat with him and report back here for people. Cheers everyone Gareth
rich_tech Posted March 29, 2011 Posted March 29, 2011 (edited) Hi, I am the IT technician that works with Gareth, he has referred me to this website directly to save us a bit of time, we had 3 PCs displaying exactly the same problem as Gareth described, two of them are now working but with an added issue which looks to be related to the onboard NIC of the intel boards. To list what ive done so far is fairly extensive as you can see with what follows:- Ive tested the power supplies with a tester, done all the boot testing, removing any devices such as usb mice, I have removed all components (including the memory, which I have also tested with Memtest86) and reseated them all (including cleaning and redoing the thermal compound on the processors as we were asked to by Stone) and I have thoroughly cleaned out the dust inside the cases and two of them so far have started to work again, though it appears that there is now a different issue with the two machines that are starting up. The problem that I am seeing now, is that they refuse to cold boot into windows at all with the LAN cable plugged into the machine, if I power the machine on with the network cable inserted into the machine then it will randomly turn the power off at some stage during startup (again not a specific stage to assist me in fault diagnosis, sometimes its just after the BIOS, sometimes its halfway through the windows load screen stage), whereas if I unplug the LAN from the machine and get it to windows xp, then plug the LAN cable back in once xp has loaded, it works fine, I am typing this post on one of the "broken" machines now at the moment, if I restart the machine once it has gotten to the windows stage also, it is then random whether the windows xp will load on it, without the power problem occurring. I have tested out the patch leads with our cable tester and they passed fine, ive even then swapped the patch cables out and the power cables too as a test and I have gone into the BIOS and disabled things like WakeOnLAN and prevented the machine restarting in the event of any power issue, to see if this would be a remedy for the problem, this has not fixed the issue, it is still evident. Has anyone ever experienced this problem before with the NIC and a stone machine or would care to suggest any further help ? Edited March 29, 2011 by rich_tech
difinity Posted March 29, 2011 Posted March 29, 2011 Have you tried removing the motherboard from the case and trying ? I've had weird booting problems before and it turned out to be a loose screw under the motherboard shorting out. Perhaps disable the onboard NIC and fit a PCI card and try that ?
tumbleweed Posted March 29, 2011 Posted March 29, 2011 Ditto - has a stone 2 weeks ago where the onboard NIC was just going crazy. Disabled and stuck a low-profile card in, now fine.
rich_tech Posted April 1, 2011 Posted April 1, 2011 To close this one off, as far as we can tell, it was a problem relating to the NIC on the intel desktop boards stopping them from starting up with the LAN plugged into the machines, a couple of low profile cards later and we are having no problems with the machines and the shutdown problem has gone.
EvLPhenom Posted April 1, 2011 Posted April 1, 2011 Good to hear you found a workaround for the problem.
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