Yup, bad power supply. It’s no thorium salt reactor, but Antec’s 750 watt power supply was enough to get the job done. Minor quibble, it’s big; I had to unship the top fan and could barely get it back in place. There’s a hair’s breadth between the modular power jack and the fan blades.
Past Ramblings
Tedious Necessities
I’d Like to Find:
Animé Blogs
Animé Plus
Non-Animé
Retail etc.
Webcomics
-
Recent Rambles
Recent Comments
Was there a recent change in your hardware? If not, and your machine went from working, to a bit wonky, to dead, and you fixed it with a power supply upgrade, I’d start saving up for a new motherboard and/or video card. I’ve been down that exact same path before. Basically I had a marginally powered system, and as it got old and dusty and the fans started working harder and the contacts got a little less efficient it dropped below spec. In the process of letting me know that it wasn’t happy it did permanent damage to some of the video and motherboard components, and I lost both a few months later. If you haven’t already, I’d go wild with compressed air and get any visible dust out of the system. Then get some denatured alcohol and swipe out the insides of the fan shrouds, and if you’re brave unseat all your memory, cards, etc and swipe the contacts. While you’re in there, look at the capacitors and see if any of them are showing signs of beginning to swell. If you get that machine back to a more or less pristine state you might stave off doom, or at least make things last longer.
Too much work. I’ll just replace the parts when they fail. In fact, I seriously considered a complete rebuild at this point, but I decided against it because of the amount of money I’ve spent on other necessities over the last month. If I can get another six-seven months before a MB failure, I’m happy. What with the physical limits on Moore’s law being reached, yearly upgrades aren’t as necessary as they once were. Still, the only thing I’ve done since building Lyar is pick up Dr. Heinous’ old video card, install a faster processor, and a new hard drive. Oh, and add 4mb more RAM that my system doesn’t even use, seeing as it’s using a 32-bit OS. Meh.