Bad Motherboard? Help Troubleshooting PC

Troubleshooting a motherboard takes time and skill. As you will discover from this forum post made recently, sometimes it also takes a little teamwork, too.

I’m not very experienced troubleshooting PC hardware. I have a computer (4 year old Celeron 1.3) that started crashing a couple of days ago. If I waited long enough to restart it the PC would be useable for a couple of hours before it crashed again.

Today it crashed and didn’t come back on.

I opened the case and powered it on. The CPU fan didn’t come on. My first feeling is that the CPU overheated and powered the PC off . . . and maybe eventually cooked? How do I test a CPU? Put it in another machine?

Anyway, the HDD powers on, an extra fan I have powers on (when plugged into the power supply)and the on/off switch on the PC works just fine. Source: CNET Forums

[tags]cpu,hdd,motherboard,pc hardware[/tags]