Slackmaster2K
Gone
Sometimes the hardest problems to diagnose are your own. If somebody had posted this to the forum here I would've responded instantly with "check your power supply!"
When I built my wife's computer, we got some case off eBay with a 300W power supply that was supposedly Athlon rated. I never really checked it out honestly, but I did make sure it said 300W on the label.
Anyway, her machine has always had strange problems. She went through 2 CDROM drives in about a year, and lost one hard drive. I initially thought the hard drive puked because it was on the promise controller of her Asus motherboard, and I've seen controller/hard drive problems several times in the past. When we replaced her drive, I stuck it on the regular VIA controller and called it good. No problems after that for a long long time.
Then last week she starts having problems copying files. Explorer would lock up and shit. I thought maybe she was just being impatient and didn't pay enough attention (she works with massive image files). Then suddenly on friday, the dreaded "invalid boot device" blue screen (win2k). I pulled the machine apart and stuck my head in it to listen to the drive, and sure enough it was making some nasty "clicks" and "screaching" sounds. Fudge!
Initially I thought it might just be the drive, but this was just too much. So I stuck the drive into my machine and did a couple runs of a chkdisk on it with the surface scan. The drive reported a couple bad sectors but otherwise ran totally fine...quiet, no problems. I've seen false bad sector reports before on drives that weren't damaged, so I was (and am) skeptical that the drive itself is bad. I stuck it back in her machine with MY power supply and voila, it booted right up, no problems. Ran a few more long checks on the drive and they came back clean.
Be warned. Strange problems with drives, USB devices (she couldn't boot with certain USB devices attached), and various instability (rebooting, etc) can often be attributed to the power supply. Also listen for noises coming from the supply when you're working it. I had a power supply once that would emit a high pitched squeal when I'd play games or even just scroll a window. It died after a few months of that. Usually when a power supply dies it just stops working altogether (won't power up) and doesn't really do any damage. In situations like my wife's, however, they can be quite dangerous.
Be leary of cheap power supplies. The power supply in her machine weighed just a few ounces. Absolutely cheap crap. A good power supply will have a nice weight to it. Buy name brand if possible. I'm replacing hers with a 300W Enermax with dual fans and adjustable fan speed for pseudo-noiseless operation...$48.
(BTW, her system is just a Duron 866/133 with 512MB of PC133, one hard drive, geforce2 graphics, one CDROM drive, on an Asus A7V133 motherboard. Not exactly a system that should be hard on a decent 300W supply.)
Slackmaster 2000
When I built my wife's computer, we got some case off eBay with a 300W power supply that was supposedly Athlon rated. I never really checked it out honestly, but I did make sure it said 300W on the label.
Anyway, her machine has always had strange problems. She went through 2 CDROM drives in about a year, and lost one hard drive. I initially thought the hard drive puked because it was on the promise controller of her Asus motherboard, and I've seen controller/hard drive problems several times in the past. When we replaced her drive, I stuck it on the regular VIA controller and called it good. No problems after that for a long long time.
Then last week she starts having problems copying files. Explorer would lock up and shit. I thought maybe she was just being impatient and didn't pay enough attention (she works with massive image files). Then suddenly on friday, the dreaded "invalid boot device" blue screen (win2k). I pulled the machine apart and stuck my head in it to listen to the drive, and sure enough it was making some nasty "clicks" and "screaching" sounds. Fudge!
Initially I thought it might just be the drive, but this was just too much. So I stuck the drive into my machine and did a couple runs of a chkdisk on it with the surface scan. The drive reported a couple bad sectors but otherwise ran totally fine...quiet, no problems. I've seen false bad sector reports before on drives that weren't damaged, so I was (and am) skeptical that the drive itself is bad. I stuck it back in her machine with MY power supply and voila, it booted right up, no problems. Ran a few more long checks on the drive and they came back clean.
Be warned. Strange problems with drives, USB devices (she couldn't boot with certain USB devices attached), and various instability (rebooting, etc) can often be attributed to the power supply. Also listen for noises coming from the supply when you're working it. I had a power supply once that would emit a high pitched squeal when I'd play games or even just scroll a window. It died after a few months of that. Usually when a power supply dies it just stops working altogether (won't power up) and doesn't really do any damage. In situations like my wife's, however, they can be quite dangerous.
Be leary of cheap power supplies. The power supply in her machine weighed just a few ounces. Absolutely cheap crap. A good power supply will have a nice weight to it. Buy name brand if possible. I'm replacing hers with a 300W Enermax with dual fans and adjustable fan speed for pseudo-noiseless operation...$48.
(BTW, her system is just a Duron 866/133 with 512MB of PC133, one hard drive, geforce2 graphics, one CDROM drive, on an Asus A7V133 motherboard. Not exactly a system that should be hard on a decent 300W supply.)
Slackmaster 2000
) and my troubles went away.
. I wasn't able to stuff 100% of the case ('bout 75%) so I basically *know* it's no big help.