IdiotInCharge
NVIDIA SHILL
- Joined
- Jun 13, 2003
- Messages
- 14,675
I cleared the cmos but I never discharged the capacitors. Not really sure how to do that. the motherboard has been unplugged from the pc and taken apart for a couple of days now.
One way to look at it is this: ATX always has power on, even when it's off, if it is connected, and there are a number of capacitors that help with that. Note that if you take the power away while a system is running it takes a bit for board LEDs to fade- there's a lot of power being 'buffered' there!
That also means that there are a lot of places to hold some nominal charge that could keep corrupt data from being cleared.
Now, the way to get the system to try and burn any charge off (as mentioned above) is to disconnect all power including the CMOS battery and push the power button. This opens all of the circuits and attempts to draw a load, hopefully draining any latent charge and clearing any volatile memory.