Two of my desktops installed a major Windows 7 patch yesterday while I was at work apparently. When I came home, one system was powered off and the other was frozen.

I rebooted the one that was frozen and it completed the patch installation and worked normally. I turned on the other one and it would not even get to the point that I could get into the BIOS.

Symptoms are: blank monitors, lights out on the keyboard and on on the mouse, fans turning, disk drives are getting power. Swapped out vid cards, keyboard and hard disks, but don't have swappable items to test the PSU, MB/CPU. Onboard network card.

I'm hoping that someone can offer an educated guess as to my next stop or which part I should focus on replacing first so that I can possibly avoid buying them all if I get lucky on the first.

The system itself is fairly new and has ran like a champ.

Parts breakdown:
NZXT HALE90-850-M 850W ATX 12V v2.2, EPS 12V v2.91 80 PLUS GOLD Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply
CORSAIR DOMINATOR 6GB (3 x 2GB) DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Triple Channel Kit
SAPPHIRE 100314SR Radeon HD 6870 1GB 256-bit GDDR5
MSI X58A-GD65 Core i7 Intel X58
Intel Core i7 - 920 CPU(4 x 2.66GHz) 8MB LGA1366
2 Barracuda 1TB hard disks Raid 0

No beeps or other POST errors?

Try reseating CPU and memory.

No beeps or other POST errors, no. It would beep when I pulled the RAM out entirely, but that's it.

I'll try reseating the CPU when I get home. Thanks.

After cleaning the old thermal paste off and applying new, it worked like a charm. Thanks Leo.

Glad to be of service.

Leo4Prez

How ironic a Windows Patch causes CPU to overheat?

_________________
"Creating Havoc and Pie Since 2001!"
My Website: http://www.anthonyhays.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/cakvala

The CPU wasn't overheating fortunately. It worked fine after I had re-seated it.

The only reason I even mentioned the thermal paste was because that was the part that took the most time (all of a minute). I had never screwed with a CPU before, so the entire affair was something of a novelty after I realized that I wasn't going to have to drop more money yet.

I doubt the patch caused the problem. More that likely just a coincidence that it happened at the same time.