Today, I have a more hardware-related question. I have an Intel board, and I really do not know which board it is, I built the machine for a relative, but he forgot to keep the documentation. Long story short, the computer was disconnected during a lightning storm, but a lightning strike travelled in via the ethernet cable (It was directly connected to a power brick commonly seen on those long distance ISP Wireless transmitters), and the motherboard was shocked. I am attempting to get this PC going. The problem is as follows: The computer will randomly reboot, just in the middle of anything as it pleases. May load to EFI (or whatever BIOS is nowadays), may load to bootloader, may even get to the OS. But before 5 minutes is up, the system will always die. Out of curiosity, I plugged my voltmeter in to a molex connector. On the 5V side, it gets a good, consistant +5.13V. On the 12V side, it fluctuates, as follows: Upon immediate startup, it soars to 12.11-12.13V. It will now do one of two things: it will immediately jump down to 12.04-12.05V, or hover for about a minute at 12.11-12.13, then jump down. It seems the longer the voltage stays at 12.11-12.13, the shorter the machine will stay running. Also, post codes, whenever the machine locks up, but does not die hard, seem to be between "AA" and "AC". Does this make any sense to anybody? Do you all think this motherboard is salvageable? It was an expensive bugger, and I'd prefer to not replace it.
