I was woken at 6am this morning by the Bwee-Bwerp Bwee-Bwerp of my slot-loading DVD-ROM drive continually trying to eject a non-existant disc. I knew something wasn’t right, so I got out of bed and walked over to my PC. I shook the mouse to de-activate the screen saver (as I normally do), but the screen remained blank. I tapped on the keyboard, but still nothing.
Figuring that something was definitely wrong, I hit the reset button on the front of the box — nothing. Finally, I held the power-button to power it down before going back to bed.
Once before, I had problems with this box. Previously, my CDR drive had aparently gone bad, and was mucking with the system’s stability as a whole. That time, I just unplugged the CDR drive’s power cable, and the system returned to normal. So, after getting up and having a shower, I tried that trick once more. One by one, I unplugged the power cables from my various drives, trying the power switch after each one. But, the box still wouldn’t come to life.
Running out of options, I figured that the power supply itself may have died. So, I put my hand up to its output-fan to check for a breeze: nope. Curiously enough, the internal fans in my case were still spinning, so I wasn’t certain if the power supply was dead.
I headed off to Fry’s to look for a new power supply. Pleasantly, they had almost a dozen to choose from. So, I asked one of the employees about the differences between them. He mentioned that, with the more expensive ones, you’re mostly just paying for the brand name. But, after telling him my story, he suggested that I could try a power supply tester to see if it really was the power supply that had gone bad.
The power supply testers were only about $12, so I decided to give that a try. “Besides,” I thought, “if it turns out that the power supply is ok, I can always make use of Fry’s 30-day return policy.”
Once back at the apartment, I plugged my power-supply into the tester and, sure enough, it was dead. So, I drove back to Fry’s once more. Still not entirely sure about which power supply would suit me best, I picked up one from JGE — it was 300 watts (just like my old one) and AMD Approved (which was reassuring).
I drove back to the apartment and, before installing the new power supply, I tested it with the power supply tester (both to check on the power supply but also to make sure that the tester was working properly). The little LED on the tester lit up green, so the power supply looked to be good.
I installed the power supply into the case and, after a gathering of courage, turned on the machine. Success! So, once again my machine is alive and well. Whew.