An invaluable piece of test equipment for any Computer Repair company is a POST Card. I’m not talking about the piece of paper with a picture on it that requires a postage stamp to send, I mean a P.O.S.T. Card.

P.O.S.T. is an acronym that stands for Power On Self Test.

Have you ever noticed the beeps your computer makes when you start it up? That is a small part of the internal part Power On Self Test. The number and length of the beeps tell you if you have hardware problems and what the (general) problem is.

A Power On Self Test Card goes through hardware diagnostics and shows error codes on the display. Different codes mean different things on different motherboards but some are the same. For example, “FF” or “00″ means there is a problem with the CPU. “C1″, “C6″, “31″, and “3E” are typically memory errors.

Some of these hardware errors can be difficult to diagnose without tools that tell you what the error is. That is why I recommend having a P.O.S.T. Card, they have diagnose many errors and a good one also comes with a book to give more details about the error code.

I am not endorsing any specific brand or manufacturer, just the type of card. I would recommend googling “power on self test card”.

Happy Computing,
Tim

Biden PC is a Computer Network Consulting Company.

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