Well, that was interesting

[Charles Lindsey]

Two days ago I was online checking the forums and other stuff as usual. I got knocked offline. No big deal, happens all the time. I had been choking it down a good deal so I decided I had better restart.

Instead of a warm boot I powered down and waited a few seconds. When I went to turn it back on the green led surrounding the power btton glowed for only a sec and the red led indicating disk activity flashed once then nothing. I figured I just didn't hold it down long enough so I try again. Same thing. Thereafter nothing at all would happen.

So I pulled it out and yanked the cover off. As I was doing that I noticed a small amount of dust covering the power supply air hole on the back of the case. I removed that and started looking more. I checked the power strip. It was fine. I unplugged the power cord and replugged it. Still nothing.

I begin to suspect the power supply. I unplugged that from the mother board and for some strange reason plug it back up. I hear the beep, the disk drive cranked up, and it's been working fine since.

Wha' happened?

Do power supplies have thermal protection?

P.S. This is more evidence supporting my theory that computers are inherently evil.

[Sidargo]

Yes, many Power Supplies nowadays HAVE a thermal protection. But especially cheap south-asian-manufactured computers and other equipment lack this vital component.

Talking about important components in modern PCs, the first thing I usually do is check which kind of RAM is installed on the new-bought pc ... may sound stupid, but I ONLY buy infineon-ram, which is pretty cheap nowadays (I pay about 20 $ US for a 128MB-dimm and 35$ US for a 256MB-Dimm (i work for a laaaarge software-company for a living and to pay for my studies, so I get "special" discounts" ) ) (umm ... how many brackets ... thats why my java-code never works .. lol) ... umm ...

and another part ... check if theres (right word ? ->) heat-transfer-paste between the cooler and the CPU, since any other means of thermal managment attempts will almost certainly result in desaster ....

and last but not least: most underestimated but REALLY important: Coffee, Coke and Pepsi without which PCs might run, but wont work

Cheers