Project: eMachines T-3256 restoration (4)

I let the alcohol dry overnight and now the cpu is ready to have the thermal paste applied.

The paste should only be applied to the cpu (the pink part) and should be no more than the thickness of a piece of paper. I applied it from the syringe and used the included wooden spreader to move it around, covering the cpu.

 

The heat sink only goes on one way (there is a notch on one side). I positioned it and clipped it into place. Just to be safe I removed the power supply so I could make sure the clips on both sides of the heat sink were correctly engaged.

I plugged in the fan connector to the power plug on the motherboard. I then hooked up the video connector (VGA) for the monitor to the connector on the video card as usually installing a video card in a machine with an on board video chip will override the on board chip. Finally I hooked up a USB keyboard and a USB mouse.

Next I connected the power cord to the power supply and then to the power strip.

There is no switch on the power supply so the only way to power up the machine is to use the power button on the front of the case. I pressed the button, it lit up, the cpu fan started running and the monitor came up with the 'e' but no indication of the key to press to access the bios. I tried the F2 (Dell's solution) but it failed.

A quick visit to Google (Tech Law #1: Google is your friend.) told me to try F2, Escape, Tab or Delete.
I tried Tab which failed and then Delete, which didn't.

Finally for today I hooked up the machine to my kill-a-watt EZ to measure the power being consumed and burn in the new paste on the cpu. After a couple of hours if was registering usage of $.28-.29 per day, but this is without a hard drive.