On Power Supplies

My computer problems seem to end up being power supply problems... at least they're usually not catastrophic (to data anyway), but they are sometimes tricky to diagnose.  In any case, I wouldn't be writing about this if I hadn't had such a problem and wanted to share. :)

On Sunday the computer "wasn't working".  It appeared to be on but I couldn't get the display to come up.  So I rebooted and got a POST error about something being wrong with the CPU.  I wasn't too thrilled about that...

I waited a bit and tried again... this time it booted and then went into Windows, but then after a minute or so it "sort of" died back to the weird half dead state where it seemed to kinda be working.  I took some canned air and the canister vacuum and gave the inside of the case a good cleaning in hopes that maybe it was just some dust causing a problem... but that left me at the same spot.  I gave up for the night and planned to resume tonight.

All day I've been worried about my data... we've been thinking about using Jungle Disk to do offsite backup of some of our stuff, in particular our photos but hadn't gotten around to it... In any case, this event has made that a higher priority.  I'll post again in a few days once I have that set up and can give a decent review.

Back to the story... I resumed my diagnostics tonight.  This time it wouldn't start up at all... Not good.  But at this point I figured that it had to be the power supply though... or at least it was part of the puzzle.  I luckily had an old computer lying around and I hooked up its power supply to this computer (just the motherboard and main hard drive).  It looked a little like I was "jumping" it (like a car) since I didn't take the power supply out of the other computer but laid it down next to it and stretched the power cables over. 

After using the other power supply, everything seemed to work fine.  As a test, I used it to look up what stores were still open that would have a reasonably priced power supply.  The one in the other computer is older, doesn't have all the right cable endings and probably would end up being a little underpowered for what's in this computer.  Plus we were planning on setting it up for Tyler in place of the ten year old HP (yes, the one that Jeff got when he started his freshman year at BYU, with some upgrades along the way like more RAM and a better video card). 

Anyway, Circuit City is open until 10 (it was almost 9 at the time) and they had a decent deal on an Antec Basiq 500W power supply.  I ran out there to pick it up and that seems to have done the trick and everything is working fine now.  Hopefully this will prolong its life until we're ready to buy a new one.  Hooray!