Let's play "what part is failing?"

[Undertoad]

An older power suply is also likely to have accumulated a lot of dust, which usually cruddies up the fan bearings eventually, and make it noisy and/or fail.

[tw]

Originally posted by SteveDallas
Besides what Brian said, my experience in fixing "store-bought" computers is that they often skimp on the power supply.

Again lets return to the 'numbers game' lies from clone power supply vendors. Many brand name computers now use 200 and 250 watt power supplies. If those supplies were rated using the deceptive technique of clone vendors, then those same 200+ watt supplies would be advertised as 300 and 375 watt supplies. What I have found: brand name computer supplies actually output the power as claimed. Clone supplies routinely do not output that power AND are also missing essential functions.

These problems were also demonstrated in tests in Tom's Hardware at
http://www6.tomshardware.com/howto/0...021/index.html

Time and time again, our lab measurements were unable to verify the output figures represented on the model identification sticker. And how, exactly, is a computer purchaser supposed to check the output of a power supply?

Even in published tests, clone power supplies failed to provide full power. They also did something that no power supply must ever do. Some self destructed before full power could be obtained because it was defective by design. Clone products intentionally manufactured to sell at a low price to 'computer experts' who never even read numerical specifications. Wattage number provided only to deceive.

Another spec missing from that crappy supply. It has no overpower protection. At full power, the supply may instead self destruct - destroying with it the disk drive, its data, the motherboard, etc. Catastrophic failure directly traceable to the human who failed to learn basic and simple computer concepts. Failure that even Tom's Hardware demonstrates way too common in clone power supplies.

Power supply in the original post may be a classic example. But we cannot know until the 3.5 digit multimeter has provided necessary numbers.

[jaguar]

It has no overpower protection. At full power, the supply may instead self destruct - destroying with it the disk drive, its data, the motherboard, etc.

Sure of that? I've worked with the kind of supplies you're talking about, utter lies on wattage, cheap pieces of shit and seen literally hundreds of the fuckers blow but I've never seen one take a computer with it.

[mbpark]

Jag,

I've seen it happen with servers. It's especially prevalent with the cheaper power supplies. My friend who owns a web hosting company (burst.net) has literally thousands of servers in place, so we have a representative sample .

We have seen PS's from multiple vendors completely blow out motherboards, or fry certain components. It's more common than we'd like to think.

TW is right. If you have machines where the PS runs in a bad way, it will cause major issues.

Mitch

[jaguar]

hmm ok, I'll take your word on it, maybe these ones had some kind of protection after all. I couldn't get burst.net to load, maybe his PSU has blown.

[mbpark]

And I just loaded the site fine. No, his PSU didn't blow out there. He uses good ones since he hates paying for replacements.