Power supply failures!!!!!!

Need I say it? Buy a Mac ... you won't have these problems. :-)

Craig C.

Macs are now offically PCs with another OS on it.

Some thing will need to be flashed for the system to work properly again.

Did you check the capacitors on the mainboard?

Generally when I see PSU failures these days its either due to the PSU being a complete piece of shit from the get-go (Powmax ftw!) or its starting to eat capacitors. The era that system was made we saw tons of rapidly failing capacitors being soldered into EVERYTHING, including PSUs and mobos.

Almost every system I see with a blown PSU has blown mobo caps. Not sure which one causes the other to fail, but they're definetly linked, and PSU replacement alone won't keep these systems alive long. I personally haven't had a problems replacing caps as long as I used proper low-ESR caps. Don't go to radio shack trying to get replacements, you'll get a bigger mess than you have already.

I've seen perfectly good brand/model/age mainboard capacitors fail due to bad PSU caps. The dirty power the PSU dumps out seems to raise hell with everything farther down. Because of this I also pretty much require a new PSU in any system that requires an HD replacement, assuming the failed HDD is a semi-modern FDB-equipped HDD with no mass failure issues. Upon inspection 90%+ of the time I've found blown capacitors in the PSU.

For more info on the capacitor problem and how to diagnose it:

Of course, these days $160-170ish worth of parts would get a machine 6x+ faster (Athlon64 x2 3600+ on an nforce 6100 mobo) in the same case, including 1GB of modern RAM and a decent PSU. It all comes down to what your time is worth...

Several years ago there were major issues with inferior motherboard capacitors. Several employees from a major capacitor factory left and started their own company. Their capacitors were much cheaper so many motherboard manufactures switched to them. Often these new cheap caps failed in only 1 or 2 years. MSI, ASUS, ABIT, and others all used these cheap caps and suffered the consequences.

Craig C. thought everyone should know:

MAC???????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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I'm sticking with KDE, besides i have a new powersupply and purdy case =)

i'll give you props on unix though... :P

Yuppers. My otherwise worthy ASUS board suffered from weird USB issues throughout its life. No *visible* damage to caps, but as it came from that era I'm pretty sure they were marginal on my board.

Just replaced it with another ASUS, an M2N-SLI-Deluxe (plus a dual-core AMD 64 X2 5600+, 4MB Ram, and between internal and external, about 1.4TB of HD space). Didn't have to replace the PSU though (CoolerMaster), it's still sound.

New system kicks butt though, especially since I upgraded from a mere AMD 64 3000+ w/1GB RAM.

I'm pleasantly surprised there seems to be as many geeks in here as mechanics. Guess I shouldn't be, since the skillset/interests are definitely related!

I'm a geek that can sometimes fix my truck, rather than a mechanic that can fix a computer, though :)

jmc

Suddenly, without warning, Chris Thompson exclaimed (7/2/2007 2:13 AM):

My case is purdy too!

jmc

^^^^^^ That's your problem right there. After 3 boards I will NEVER buy one again. They were they highest priced at Fry's for the AMD. Now I am happy with ones only half the cost they sell.

You may want to learn from a longer post on 2 Jul in the newsgroup Computer Tech Support entitled "Power Supply keeps blowing?". Major difference exist between supplies. Some benchmarks for identifying inferior supplies are provided.

jmc thought everyone should know:

much nicer than mine :P

of course i was coming from a basic cheapo case so just about anything is better than the old one =)

jmc thought everyone should know:

mine is a microstar ms 6340 with a AMD processor. It has served me well, when i get a chance though i think its time to upgrade though, i want 2 gig of memory and at least 250 gig of hard disk space =)

as far as the caps I'm sitting here looking at them. i see no physical signs of damage. and the system still performs as well as it ever has.

What type of software are you running that would be slow on a AMD 64 3000?

I used to upgrade every couple years because speeds would double and triple or more every year. Now we see gains of 10-20% each year and only in certain specific areas of computing.

Hard drives are still the bottleneck. SATA is an improvement but we still are using a mechanical disc & head mechanism. I've used SCSI for years. Expensive but ran circles around ATA. Still use SCSI in servers.

Wow..and you just installed XP for the first time???

Vista is already out after only.....6 years!

Windows.

Well true but not many applications for windows require much more than an AMD 64 3000. So my question is what application are you running where the the AMD 64 is too slow and you're having to wait? About the only application I run that the faster the better is FEA analysis software. It can take hours or days to run a stress analysis. So the faster the CPU the better. Normal consumer software rarely would benefit.

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>

Vista, what a load of crap that one is.

It's basically XP SP4 with some fancy do nothing graphics.

Why do we need a new OS every few years anyways? Often the main desire is for stability and compatibility. Companies still run decades old software applications under Unix on modern computers. Our Unix server has been rebooted a total of 5 times in 10 years not counting power outages. Two of those times were when the server was upgrade. I reboot any Windows PC a few times a week. I was hoping in another few years XP would become stable...but now we have a new OS and start all over again.

Editing RAW photos from my 10MP Canon Rebel XTi (400D outside of the US). Mostly I think I needed the extra RAM.

Also, I multitask, multiple different proggies open at the same time.

In normal stuff, surfing and email and all, the extra processing power doesn't make a lot of difference, but it's just about halved the time it takes to save an image after editing.

jmc