The chapter on PC power supplies from Upgrading and Repairing PCs. I'm in awe of this book, and consider buying it every time I have a PC hardware problem, but I usually recoil when I see how much information is presented and how little of it I actually need at a given moment.1 See, I'm old. And lazy. (And not the productive kind of lazy, either, the lazy kind.2)
It is useful to know that the interactions between the power supply and the motherboard are actually quite sophisticated, it's not just an AC/DC converter. My personal server shut itself off in a blink while I was using it last week, and I'm confident that the problem was not a hardware failure, but a configuration issue: too many hard drives, not enough watts. It was confusing because this configuration worked "fine" for several years at the old apartment, and only in the new basement did it decide it couldn't work under these conditions. And by "fine," I mean every once in a while it'd dump "Argh! Kernel error! I can't—uh, I, uh, OK, I guess it's OK now" to my shell, and everything would seem fine, and I wouldn't have enough information to figure out what went wrong.3 I suppose shutting itself off is preferable, since it convinces me to address the issue.
My new 1.21 jigawatt power supply from PC Power and Cooling went in easily, but when I hit the turn-on-please button, nothing happened. No beeps, no fans, no hard drives, nothing. Sadly, putting the old supply in produced the same effect! Oh no! I must have stupidly come within five feet of the motherboard without simultaneously being in contact with a copper wire that leads to the Earth's core! I'm actually not sure what I did, but it was enough to inspire me to get a new mobo, which meant re-installing Linux from the bottom up because I don't have the patience to figure out how to set up new hardware by hand.4 A few days of setting up software passed and I decided it was time to hook up the remaining hard drives and close the box. Turn on please: fans go on, hard drives spin up, but no beeps, no video, nothing else.
This new motherboard is supposed to tell me what's wrong during boot up. That is, it's supposed to speak English words out of a little speaker: "Pardon me, sir, but I do believe there is a screwdriver lying across my capacitor leads." But it was mute. Shut down, go to sleep, wake up, shower, go to work, come home, sulk in front of the TV, try again, this time with only one hard drive. Works. Do I add the second drive? And risk the heartbreak?
I try to be thorough, but these are not proper hardware troubleshooting techniques. I lack the time, the tools and the spare parts required to say for sure whether the new power supply is not fully functional, whether I damaged the motherboard, or whether other pieces of this puzzle are failing and causing odd problems. I've introduced two new major pieces to solve one problem that, for all I know, wasn't a power problem. The PS was my first guess, and it appears to be common knowledge that a 235W supply isn't enough for multiple hard drives. Of course, I could have added up the wattage use for each component in the box to verify the load. But I didn't. I'd rather buy a new PS than add up some numbers, and I'd rather buy a new motherboard than... I dunno...
I'm old and getting older. Maybe I should resign myself to that fact and just pay younger men to fix it for me.
1 Amazon user reviews for Upgrading and Repairing PCs blame the text for including too much useless information, especially text for legacy hardware from previous editions of the book.
2 Not that there's a productive kind of lazy when it comes to hardware. S'why I'm a software guy.
3 Random seeming behavior such as CPU complaints like these are often caused by an overheated processor, usually from a failing CPU fan or poor airflow through the box. In this case, the mobo reported an ambient temp of 65°F and a CPU temp of 135°F, comfortably below the 140°F (60°C) running temp for the AMD Athlon.
4 Newer Linuxes are great at auto-detecting hardware, but only during installation. Switch its boxers for briefs and it has to learn how to go to the bathroom all over again.
