A First – Intel E6850 Fried

The system stopped dead in its tracks. Nothing along the lines of standard troubleshooting brought it back to life.

• Pull the A/C from the PSU and pull the BIOS battery leaving it sit for 15 minutes.
• Change the PSU (Power Supply)
• Pull all add-in cards.

Nothing worked.

So, we RMAd the motherboard since that would be the next most common component to fail.

The replacement came, we swapped the boards and the system did indeed power up.

We flashed the BIOS with the most current version and set the RAID to enabled since the system has two 300GB drives in a RAID 1 array via the onboard Intel controller

One of the more puzzling things to see when the system came to Windows Vista’s “I didn’t shutdown properly” black screen with boot options was watching each letter take about 3-5 seconds for each letter to be placed on the screen.

That was pretty bizarre.

We reset the BIOS settings to factory defaults just in case something we set in there was not being liked.

Windows Vista did indeed begin to boot only to have the system shut itself off.

When we powered it up again there was an error message on a single line stating that the system was shutdown previously due to a CPU thermal event.

The system refused to boot from there.

In all of my years of working in this industry, this is probably the first time I have ever seen a CPU failure.

A replacement CPU is on the way and hopefully the replacement motherboard in the system did not get taken out in the process.

We will find out tomorrow when the CPU arrives.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer

Intel vPro System Defense Utility Now Available

We use the Intel System Defense Utility to manage our smaller clients that have vPro enabled workstations.

The utility gives us the ability to power cycle the system, remote boot via image for troubleshooting or OS load, and more.

It is available here: Intel System Defense Utility.

Some prep work on the workstation needs to happen prior to being able to connect with the ISDU.

• AMT password set.
• System Name.
• AMT management set to SMB versus Enterprise.
• AMT set to the newest version.

We keep a record of all of the system names and their AMT passwords.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer

Intel System Defense Utility Is Not Available?

We use the Intel System Defense Utility to manage our vPro enabled workstations here in our shop as well as at client sites.

Apparently the utility has been pulled:

The e-mail link in the above screenshot is live on the download site here: Intel System Defense Utility Download.

The text file does not mention anything other than the fact that it has been temporarily pulled:

Please note that the Intel(r) System Defense Utility is temporarily unavailable. Please check back in the future. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Please contact your local Intel Customer Center for additional information. You may contact Intel Customer Support by visiting http://supportmail.intel.com/

Hopefully we will see the download reappear soon!

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer