Hi, okay I went to his house and tried everyhing but still the computer does not go into the windows screen, it stays blank, so we went online on my computer and bought an AMD Socket 754 CPU Chip and the Thermal Paste, we hope that it is only the CPU that is damaged and nothing else You said earlier that we might need to reinstall Windows XP to the system, do you think it might be necessary to do this? Because there is some bad news.... lol the computer that he bought did not come with the CD that says Windows XP!!! It came with a few Cd's but not one says Windows XP on it If we put this new chip that we got and it turns on the computer, what will it do after?? Thank you again for the help, you dont know how much I appreciate this! and to think that he just bought this computer a couple months ago!

He should have a Recovery CD or a Recovery partition on the hard drive.

Actually he will only have to re-activate XP most likely. Microsoft will detect his Product Key in use on a second CPU and they will want to verify it is the same computer.

Also check the socket structure. It should really have some type of retention clip to hold the CPU in the socket.

Also be very careful handling the CPU and setting it. As you've found out they are extremely fragile.

Thanks for the thanks and let us know how it goes.

Thanks, its just amazing how fragile the CPU really is. Yes the socket does have a retention clip, do you think that we damaged the socket structure? since the cpu came off with the heatsink as we were taking it out?

You might have damaged the retention mechanism.

The socket is stronger than the pins.

It sounds to me like you/he twisted the heatsink/fan to lift it off. Hence bent pins and forcing the retention mechanism to fail.

The thermal paste sometimes creates a very strong bond between the CPU and heatsink base. Not much advise here but to be very patient and Do Not force anything.

I have literally spent an hour encouraging a heatsink to separate from a CPU. Patience and gentleness are required. Some inexpensive and usually overused pastes will dry out and become very hard to separate.

I will def tell him about that advice! I think an hour taking out the heatsink from the cpu is much smarter than forcing it out in 10 minutes and then having to buy an new CPU So do you think that when the new cpu arrives and we install it (carefully) into the socket, it will most likely work?

I would think so.

Check the old CPU for any "missing" pins in the case that any might have broken off in the socket. In that case make sure you get any broken pins out of the socket.

Hi, unfortunatly it did not work for his comuter. You could imagine how upset he was. So we took it to "Geek Squad" and the computer guy told us that it is the motherboard and that we should replace it. Thanks for the suggestions though.