Stick with the Dell diagnostic tool or just swap parts when a Latitude 7390 won't boot?

I had a customer bring in a Latitude 7390 last Wednesday that wouldn't power on past the Dell logo. Ran the built-in ePSA diagnostics and it pointed to a bad memory module, so I swapped both sticks for $40 worth of used Corsair RAM I had laying around. System booted fine after that, but now I'm second-guessing if I should've just thrown in a known-good power supply first like my coworker suggested, since a failing PSU can fake memory errors sometimes. For you guys, do you trust those onboard diagnostics completely or do you prefer swapping components one at a time from most to least likely based on symptoms? I'm leaning toward the swap method now because it saved me time, but I could see the diagnostics being faster on weird boards.

2 comments

2 Comments

murray.grace1mo ago

ePSA once told me my coffee maker was the problem!

smith.jordan29d ago

Hey have you ran into that PSU thing yourself? I'm with you on the swap method for sure. I had an Optiplex once that ePSA kept saying hard drive failure but it was just a loose SATA cable on the mobo. Its cool to save time with the tool but sometimes it just gives you a wild goose chase. I stick with swapping parts if I have spares handy because it actually fixes the thing instead of guessing.