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Dimension E521 Motherboards YY838, HK980, UW457, CT103
I'm hoping to repair my daughter's Dell Dimension E521 desktop running an OEM version of Windows Vista Home with 2G RAM, 250 GB SATA HD, AMD Athlon 64 Processor, X2, 4000+, 2.1GHz, 1MB (the processor according to the Service Tag info). I believe it was a Wal-Mart purchase with a manufactured date of 7/13/2007. The system had been running unattended in her home when they noticed the monitor would not come out of standby mode.
Holding the power button turned off the system, but it never booted again. The system will not POST and the power light is solid amber indicating a problem with the motherboard. None of the front diagnostic lights light up. I reset CMOS, pulled the RAM and modem board and disconnected the hard drive, but still the system does not POST and there are no beeps, but the cooling fans run for both the processor and PSU. A computer technician looked at it and agreed that the motherboard was at fault and I'm hoping the processor is still good.
The motherboard is my point of confusion. I understand that because of the case I'm limited to Dell proprietary motherboards. Most boards I see advertised for Dimension E521's are either part number HK980, UW457, or CT103. Apparently, Dell can have multiple part numbers for the motherboard for any given model over its production life. It's my luck that the board in this computer has a part number of YY838. The full number is CN-0YY838-70821-76K-F28V.
How do these four (4) motherboards differ and what, if any, chance do I have of getting the system running with one of the three (3) other motherboards using the old processor?
In my happy place, I'd just throw in a readily available new or refurbished HK980 motherboard (maybe with a new processor) and we'd be back in business with the existing OEM install of Vista (after reregistering it), but something tells me that won't happen. I'd suspect my chances for success would be better if I were to use the same processor with a new YY838 motherboard.
What kind of fun and games am I in for?
jsktx
729 Posts
1
April 3rd, 2011 04:00
An HK980 motherboard will work just fine. All four of those motherboards are the same, just different part numbers. Don't ask because I don't know why.
FixItDaddy
2 Posts
1
April 16th, 2011 18:00
Jsktx, thanks for your confident reply. You were right that a Dell HK980 motherboard is a suitable replacement for a Dell YY838 motherboard. I studied the two boards for a bit before making the swap and noticed that the YY838 board had a few groupings of electrolytic capacitors that were different colors and I therefore presume different manufactures, but the values were the same. I did find that the HK980 board had two 330µf 16V solid capacitors where the YY838 had 330µf 16V two electrolytic capacitors adjacent to the lower hold down screw for the heatsink. Also, the HK980 had one additional 330µf 16V solid capacitor just above the left side of the floppy drive connector.
I should have taken more time to see if there were any other obvious differences, but I was anxious to swap the processor and get the board into the computer. I’d never changed one before and wasn’t sure what to expect after everything was back together.
I was quite pleased to see “DELL” appear on the monitor, and then bummed to read, “PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable ….. System operating in manufacturing mode”, say WHAT? It was a comedy of errors. I didn’t have the keyboard and mouse for the computer because it was on the loaner machine with the DVD burner and I didn’t have it connected to the Internet. (First lessons learned.)
I got the keyboard, mouse and Internet connection, and then, after lots of reading online, went into BIOS setup to see if the hard drive was being recognized, but first I found the Maintenance menu open and begging me to enter unit’s Dell Service Tag. That change in BIOS didn’t fix the PXE-E61 error on reboot, but when I hit (Alt-F) to exit the “manufacturing mode”, Windows “Startup Repair” took over.
“Startup Repair” made three attempts to fix the problem, each time concluding the root cause was, “Unspecified changes to system configuration might have caused the problem”. After its last attempt, a dialog box appeared titled “Microsoft Windows” reporting “Startup Repair cannot repair the computer automatically. Sending more information can help Microsoft create solutions.” I had two options: “Send information about this problem (recommended)” or “Don’t Send”. I clicked on “Send information” and after a few minutes, which seemed like an hour, without further input from me, the original Vista operating system was up and running.
I assume that was Microsoft’s product activation system checking to see that an OEM motherboard had been used to replaced the original OEM motherboard thus allow the OEM license for Vista to remain active on that computer.