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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
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When insulation breaks down it is time to throw stuff out if it is a power supply. Motors are diff. They may be mission critical but they don;t take other stuff out with them
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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I couldn't replace the fan in the old PSU because I don't have a soldering iron and the connectors were wrong. In any case it's a cheap fan and if I'm going to renovate my old PSU I might as well put a decent fan into it.
Instead I've put in my spare spare power supply, a 300W generic (cheap) one. It had two years' solid use in its youth; either that means it's been properly burnt in and should work for a while, or it's at its end of life and will burn out soon. I don't know which. (Incidentally, I was charmed to discover it has blood stains on it. I think they are mine.)
The obvious solution to my power supply woes is to buy a good quality new one. They are expensive, unfortunately.
David
[Updated on: Wed, 06 December 2006 00:09] |
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I was charmed to discover it has blood stains on it. I think they are mine.
A dramatic story unfolding!
Unplugging your psu before operating on it is a good idea to most of us, unless you want the excitement. Some people love a bit of tension mixed with fear ;-D
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I have a theory that the reason the innards of computers are so sharp is that it's a deliberate "I told you so" from the manufacturers for breaking through the sticker that says, "NO USER SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE". Not the other way around (which would be that the sticker is there because it's sharp).
David
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jack
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Likes it here |
Location: England
Registered: September 2006
Messages: 304
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If the transformer has shorted turns you should treat is as serious,
The current on the primary and secondary would increase, which means it would continue to short, I would suggest you get it into the lab so they can do a load test,
I would have thought that the p.s.u. would have a clamping circuit for protection
life is to enjoy.
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Agree! I have no better explanation!
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Your problem could be a fan if we are talking about a regular pc and not a laptop. I beleive that most laptops don't have fans but I could be wrong.
I think you are lucky so far that nothing serious has happened to your hard drive(s) or other easily destroyed items in the computer incl the cpu. If I had your computer here I would use a testor on the power supply to see if the voltages were ok and within spec. You need to check to see if this smell is associated with a fan and especially the one used to cool the cpu.
If you act quickly you can come out of this with a fairly minor expense for a new fan. I would't wait long if I were you...............
BTW I do have some electronics background, both in a practical manor as a ham radio license holder and I have held commercial license as well, but also as having obtained a BSEE from the U of Kansas in 1963. No, that was not so long ago we didnt have electrical lights in the streets yet. LOL
Good luck with the computer. You will have more luck dealing with the parts inside than you will have with the software I would think.
Ken
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
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Laptops have fans. The are small things, and quite noisy in my exciting and 2 year old Tosh Portege A200 that has had 2 new screens and one new hard drive under warranty so far.
Without a fan it becomes a George Foreman Grill.
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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Hi Ken,
This is a desktop.
I know that the problem with the original PSU was that the fan failed. Firstly it started running roughly, then it stopped. But I was aware when it stopped, so I shut it down and pulled it out within a couple of minutes.
The fan in the second PSU seems to be fine.
>If I had your computer here I would use a testor on the power supply to see if the voltages were ok and within spec.
I tested them with my multimeter. They were okay.
>You need to check to see if this smell is associated with a fan and especially the one used to cool the cpu.
There were no apparent consequences to the hiss and smell, so I didn't ever get a definitive answer. However, I replaced the PSU anyway (again).
>If you act quickly you can come out of this with a fairly minor expense for a new fan. I would't wait long if I were you...............
The PSU with the failed fan has been taken out and is unplugged. Therefore I reckon it doesn't matter how long I take to repair it!
>Good luck with the computer. You will have more luck dealing with the parts inside than you will have with the software I would think.
Maybe under Windows, but not under Linux. Linux appears complicated to a Windows user who is used to their operating system being a "black box", but actually it's a great deal simpler, because it tells you if there's a problem.
David
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>If you act quickly you can come out of this with a fairly minor expense for a new fan.
I have come out of this with the following expenses:
- a new PSU (which I had standing by in a box already, so I essentially paid for that a long time back)
which unfortunately turned out to be dodgy, and which now I have replaced and thrown away;
- a new fan
if I want to repair the original PSU; OR
- a new PSU
a good quality one.
The most obvious and future-proof plan is for the final purchase; unfortunately good PSUs are expensive.
David
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It appears you are already in charge of your computer if you are using linux. I have not taken that leap myself but each day my ranting over windows has me a step closer. I almost took that leap to linus when I had a Commodore Amiga and it was a very good system however and I didnt make the change to linux then; I wish I had for now I would have become comfortable enough with linux to be free of windows.
If it gets much worse or they stop support for win2000 entirely I will perhaps be forced to learn more about the linux system. I find that most of the programs I use that run under windows (incl windows itself of course) tend to be made by extremely arrogant people who think they know best what I want to do on my computer and should not be allowed to control it myself.
My worst disappointment in the past year or so was learning that that movie, "Kill Bill" was not about Bill Gates!! lol
Ken
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Ken said,
>I wish I had for now I would have become comfortable enough with linux to be free of windows. If it gets much worse or they stop support for win2000 entirely I will perhaps be forced to learn more about the linux system.
There's nothing to stop you moving now! It sounds like you're putting it off and off because you're frightened of change. If you wish now you had moved a while back, but never did, then the chances are you will, in a couple of years, wish you had moved now. Don't disappoint your future self. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
GNU/Linux may be bewildering at first, but it is much more logical than Windows: you know exactly what is going on because it tells you. There is plenty of technical and not-so-technical documentation on all aspects of the system, right down to the source code. The thing I hate most about Windows is that necessity to reinstall every so often because there's no way of telling why it is misbehaving.
There's nothing to stop you moving back to Windows if you really don't like it (provided you give it a fair trial).
>If it gets much worse or they stop support for win2000 entirely I will perhaps be forced to learn more about the linux system.
I take exception to your use of the word "forced". You imply that Linux is inferior. Perhaps inferior for people who like pretty clicky interfaces, but not for the experienced user (unless he wishes to do a complicated task like video or audio editing for which the applications do not exist yet).
>I find that most of the programs I use that run under windows (incl windows itself of course) tend to be made by extremely arrogant people who think they know best what I want to do on my computer and should not be allowed to control it myself.
There is an easy solution: don't use them. Even for Windows, there are lots of open source applications available. If you don't like an open source program, you can modify the source code yourself. If you don't like Microsoft's attitude, don't buy or use its products. Then there is no need to moan about them. I am still occasionally guilty of that, but on the whole I find it much more productive to use Linux and forget about the problems of Windows (except when I am forced to use it by a particular application).
David
[Updated on: Thu, 07 December 2006 16:53] |
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Last night I lost my laptop's (PIII 800) hard disk. Hard disk errors, missing files, won't boot Windows at all, just about boots Linux but can't access half my folders, plus random clicking and grinding noises. Can't re-image the disk because lots and lots of sectors are bad, can't reinstall (not that it would help) because it doesn't have a floppy or CD-ROM drive.
Fortunately there was nothing important on the drive (apart from the operating system). Unfortunately I relied heavily on the thing because it ran Windows XP most of the time -- the university network only allows Windows 2000 or Windows XP machines to join(!). I spent most of last night working out a workaround so my Linux PC could join using port forwarding, VMWare, a virtualised copy of Windows 2000 and a self-configured virtual private network, but it's a very nasty hack and took several hours to set up.
It looks like I'm laptop-less now, with just my 8 year-old PC (which is dodgy, as documented elsewhere in this thread) for company.
Hurray for technology!
David
[Updated on: Wed, 14 March 2007 14:34] |
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Deeej, did you piss off the computer faerie?
[Updated on: Wed, 14 March 2007 17:20]
If you stand for Freedom, but you wont stand for war, then you dont stand for anything worth fighting for.
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Been there, done that, so my sympathy is with you! :-/
I hope you've got backups of your data files..
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Sailor,
I didn't keep anything important on the system. I already had a suspicion that it would fail sooner or later, as it had a tendency to get very hot, and something similar happened a few months ago (the hard disk started making funny noises and Windows randomly broke itself). That time I was able to restore from backup. Not this time, unfortunately.
Ah, well -- a Pentium III 800 is considered pretty elderly these days, even by the standards of laptops. I've looked at some Macs, but the (relatively) cheap ones aren't supported for video editing and the expensive ones are awfully so. I may be able to extract a similarly elderly hand-me-down from a relative.
David
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Yes, one thing is certain about elderly computers, they are bound to fail, probably sooner than later. But it's very annoying, none the less. I wish you good luck in trying to find a good replacement, new or used.
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