A few weeks back, my “Mothership”, a Gateway desktop I bought back in 2003 was up and running with its original power supply. The PS always buzzed and hummed a little louder than I figured it ought to, but it kept dutifully working over the years.
Well, a few weeks back, I went to pop in a CD into the DVD drive, and when the drive closed, I heared a BZZZZZ BZZZZZ, and the desktop lost power. The main power button was yellow (I assume indicating it was in ‘emergency’ mode or something, but it was getting some sort of power. There was plenty of ozone and a wisp of the magic blue smoke. I figured something shorted in the power supply, or it just got old and died.
Tonight, I slapped in a new PS, with matching specs. I got it from a company on eBay who indicated it would also fit into the desktop tower. I plugged in all of the cables to the drives, and plugged in the external power cord into the PS. The little switch on the back of the PS was turned to “0”, and as soon as I flipped it to “1”, SNAP with a flash of blue inside. “Mother pus bucket!” I thought to myself, “I just fried another power supply.”
But it got me thinking, do I just have two bum power supplies on my hands, or is there something shorted out on the motherboard or that DVD drive? I cannot possibly imagine something shorting out on either that would draw so much current as to short out the power supply–I thought that’s what the fuse is for. . . The desktop’s a great workhorse, so I want to keep it if it’s salvagable, but I just have to get the damn thing booted up to
So. . . before I order a second replacement power supply, anyone got any ideas? Are power supplies that finicky they can’t tolerate UPS ground? Or could it be something worse?
Tripler
This second one was a rather large snap. Arc-age ensued.
With the information you give I cannot give a diagnosis with any certainty. It could be any number of things.
Cheap computer power supplies are crap because they’re cheap. There is so much competition that you need to pay some serious money to get a decently reliable power supply. Still, I am amazed at how cheap they are and how they perform for the price.
Cheap electrolytic capacitors are a major reason they fail. Then often other things give way to. If you are lucky only the power supply fails. If you are not lucky it can fry the motherboard or other peripherals. Most of the time though it is onlt the PSU that fails.
Generally they are protected so that a short will just shut them down so even if the first time around the motherboard was damaged it should not damage the second PSU.
But, again, anything can happen and the only way to be sure is to do some specific tests.
The PSU on this computer I am using now has already been repaired twice and is now asking for the third repair because the fan does not start well. Once it is turning it is OK but it often will not start up and I have to start it by hand when I smell that unmistakable smell of electronics beginning to roast.
The mobo connector also burnt and the cables are soldered directly to the motherboard which makes it a mess to remove and repair the PSU.
Up to now I have been lucky and a PSU failure has never damaged anything else.
. . . and that’s what I kind of figured. Without the ability to boot the machine up, I can’t tell if there’s any damage to the motherboard or not. If there were damage, what would show? Would it run to BIOS and just stay there?
Tripler
If I could get it running, I could deduce more too.
A damaged motherboard probably would not POST, let alone get to the BIOS.
Look over the board for bulging or exploded capacitors, and anything else that looks like it may have exploded, burned or “popped” - and then ask yourself if it’s worth this much effort to revive a PC that’s getting on six years old. Sorry to be blunt, but unless you can afford to buy another power supply from another vendor* and hope it works, you may be throwing money at this thing that would be better spent on a new PC.
It is entirely possible that the replacement power supply was bad. But, we have no way of knowing if it failed badly and subjected the motherboard to excess voltage and killed it as well, other than to try another power supply.
I’m not sure when Dell stopped doing this (maybe 2002), but they used to ship their PCs with non-ATX power supplies. They were almost identical to ATX, but the pinout was changed slightly to fuck customers over.
Just power up the power supply by it self. Use a multi-meter to test the leads for the correct voltage.
Use the paper clip to get the disk out of the burner and only plug in the MB. See if the PS trips.
If OK, than add the CPU and CPU fan.
And then case fans. the Hard drives and what not one at a time.
Rinse repeat.
Might be the power switch on the tower, the one you use to normally start the system.
I might have an old Gateway PS in the garage. Got some Ram with the funky metal shielding and stuff too if you are interested…
Oh, if only part of each PS is dead, I have used 2 power supplies to handle heavy loads or to get enough leads to power all the junk.
It is generally not a good idea to power up ATX PSUs without load. Testing an ATX PSU involves more than powering it up and testing voltages. See this page for some good information.
True, but the OP doesn’t have a Dell. I believe Gateway has used standard components all along.
It’s closer to impossible, actually. If you want to test power supplies without endangering innocent motherboards, get a PSU tester. Coolmax makes a few varieties, and I think PC Power & Cooling also sells them. They go for about $15 to $50, depending on how fancy you want.
Actually, I’m in the States–UTM is a whole, cool animal. But I did have it set on 115 for local power.
[off OP]
So, I’m getting the feeling from the thread that it’s probably more worthwhile to just scrap the whole system and get a new one, which leads me to a few ideas:
A) How much do motherboards cost? Where would I find the model/nomenclature to find a similar one on the Interwebs? And if I found one. . .
B) Can I just slap the existing hard drive onto a/the new motherboard and fire it up? IIRC, the programs I’ve already loaded onto the hard drive use the serial numbers and registries from the motherboard to work. It would be a dead hard drive, correct?
C) Given I’ve got a monitor, keyboard, etc. Would it just be better for me to haul off and buy a new tower? I don’t think they’re really that expensive anymore. If I do, is there any possibility of plugging the old HDD into the new MB (a la question “B”)? Can I hook it up as an external to salvage what I can off the old HDD?
[/Off OP]
Oh, the possibilities. But then again, you’re talking to a guy who knows → ← this much about computers nowadays.
Tripler
Yeah, I still run MS-DOS v2.11 for the nostalgic feel.
On this path lies much pain… At best, Windows will be very confused when it tries to talk to an Intel chipset and a VIA chipset responds. (Or whatever you had and replace it with…) More likely, it will just give up and crash.
What you want to do is build the new PC with a new drive. Install Windows and your applications. Get everything all happy with updates and patches.
Now, connect the old drive and copy over your data. Disconnect the old drive and you’ve back in business.
Attempting to copy over applications is all but guaranteed to fail as they all scatter registry entries and dll files across the system. Definitely unlike the old DOS days where it was all in a single .exe file.