Close Call

[richlevy]

This morning I woke up and thought I'd overslept. The clock said 12:57. It took me a few moments to realize we'd had another brief power failure in the middle of the night.

I didn't think anything of it until an hour or so later when I went to turn on my desktop.

Click. Silence.

Then I knew I was screwed. A few months ago we installed a 'power leveller' in the house. The main reason for this is that our wired smoke alarms would go off briefly with any power surge,

Last night the smoke alarms did not go off. So even with the power leveller and a surge suppressor, I had a dead computer. I tried all of tricks I could think of. Turning the surge suppressor off and on. Resetting the CMOS jumper. Nothing worked. My power supply had a green LED that was dark. I couldn't remember if the LED was always on or only on if the computer was on, but this gave me some hope.

So I disconnected and disassembled the power supply looking for a circuit breaker. I didn't find any but I did see something like scorch marks on one of the parts. This gave me hope that I had a dead power supply and possibly not a dead motherboard.

Now my computer has been deteriorating for the past few months. I've had overheating and other issues. It's a Presario 2600 with an AMD Sempron and 1.5GB of RAM. With the extra software I've loaded and the ever increasing demands of McAfee Antivirus, it seems to be getting slower. I am in the market for a new computer, but I wasn't intending to rush.

So my first visit was to Second Source to see if they had a used power supply. On the way there I was guessing $10 and this turned out to be the price. I brought my old power supply with me and they confirmed that it was DOA. Again that spark of hope.

I got home and installed the power supply. I had a moment of panic before I remembered that I had disconnected the power switch from the motherboard.

So I've bought myself some time.