Over the last few months, main PC has been running a little bit warm. It's only a non overclocked 1.3 Duron, with a Cooler master silent heatpipe. But it has been running at CPU temps in excess of 70C.
Last night, it started crapping out copying from one drive to another even though the temps were below 60. Thought the drive was dying, no biggy as it is only an old Seagate 8gig. Looking at the event log, it confirmed that Drive D was having trouble. No biggy thought I, Maplin have some 120Gig ATA drives at £70 a pop, not my first choice but they are open Sunday, cheaper than PC world, and right round the corner.
The it froze solid. Then when I rebooted, took 2 hours to reboot, Not Good. Then when it did, it said it had restored a backup registry as the old one was corrupt. Yikes. Then i checked in Computer management, all drives healthy, so I thought, OK, chkdisk and defrag.
Drive D did indeed need a disk check. But it rebooted defragging it after.
Then when I tried to power cycle it, nothing. Nada, no boot. PSU had died.
An Enermax 450 watt PSU, that has been doing almost 24/7 for 4 years (bar the reboots) has toasted it'self finally. The internal fans in it were still blowing when it last worked, and turned freely, so I guess, it must have been slowly overheating, and running hot, and cooking the CPU.
Stuck in the biggest thing that the local Maplin had (400watt Q-tec £39.99, "Oh yes sir, special offer on 450Watt Q-Tecs, £29.99, except we haven't got any, and the new ones in will be back to full price).
Now it is running much better. Temps are arround 45-55C, a drop of 15-20 degrees, at this is at the warmest point.
And the HDDs are workig again.