power supply

Rebuilding the computer…again

When I upgraded computers at the beginning of the year, I thought I wouldn’t have to be working on computers for a few years. I thought the new hyper-threaded AMD processors were stable enough to make a reliable workstation. While I didn’t think it was good, I’d even gotten used to turning on the computer and restarting it before logging in so that it wouldn’t hang shortly after starting.

Well, after the episode with the new flash drive (see previous post), things got worse.

The strange 15 minute “warm up” time needed to start the computer just didn’t make sense. I had a spare power supply, (an extra I bought when the original broke after only four months) and decided that the power supply was the best place to start troubleshooting.

New PSU installed, I power up the computer. Excited that it starts up immediately, I quickly lose enthusiasm when none of the hard drives are recognized and windows fails to start.
I take the power supply down to the computer store to test, it tests as good. I find an enclosure that allows me to take my SATA drives and convert them to USB drives so the old computer can read them. This gets an A+ for useful devices! (All the drives work, even the one that I broke unplugging the data connection. Note: SATA drives have more delicate connections than the older ATA drives).

Maybe it’s time for a new motherboard. Sigh…

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