This evening, after a long day of teaching and running errands, I came home and switched on my computer. Five minutes later, it died. All of the lights were on, but nothing was happening inside. I immediately suspected my power supply. After a few more starts and subsequent deaths, along with a good look inside the case, I was 99% certain. Last year I had the same problem.
When my power supply failed last year it wasn’t immediately obvious to me what the problem was. I had never experienced it. At first, I thought the problem was my monitor. The power lights on the computer were still on, but the monitor was going black and the green light turning to orange to indicate sleep mode. Based on those symptoms, and the fact that I didn’t notice that the whirring of the fans had stopped, I was certain the problem was the monitor. I’m not one for taking my computer to the shop, prefering to fix things myself.
So I took off to the local electronics market and bought a shiny, new Samsung SyncMaster. Two months prior my video card, a Geforce 5200 LE as I recall, had burned up and I had replaced it with a Geforce 6600 GT. With the new monitor, I was anxious to try out a dual display setup on my new card. So I plugged both monitors in and everything worked fine. I couldn’t understand why the old monitor was no longer shutting off. It was just on a whim that I had plugged it in, wanting to experience the dual display for as long as I could before it died. My wife accused me of making up the original problem just so I could have two monitors. I was puzzled, but happy… until both monitors started shutting down a few days later.
At that point I became quite frustrated. I was almost willing to go to shelve my ego and take everything to a repair shop. Before doing that, I did some intensive research online. It wasn’t easy going. I tried as many combinations of the relevant search terms I could think of with Google. As a result, I sifted through dozens of help requests and trouble shooting guides from a variety of tech support forums and websites across the internet. All the while, my monitors kept shutting off, forcing me to power off the system and reboot, and the time between each reboot was growing shorter and shorter. Finally, I found a thread in a forum somewhere that seemed to be what I was looking for. One of the posts in the thread was from someone asking the original poster if it wasn’t really the power supply shutting off instead of the monitor itself. It was one of those Eureka moments.
After some quick testing I realized that, indeed, the power supply was shutting off and that’s what caused the monitors to go into hibernation. The fans, the hardrives, everything shutdown. Only the power light remained on. I slapped my forehead for not noticing the lack of noise. The next day I dropped a new power supply in and all was well. So when both of my monitors went dead today and the room got quiet, the power light didn’t fool me.
Unfortunately, it was after 7:00 pm when all of this happened. The electronics market where I do all of my hardware shopping shuts down early on Saturdays. The store I regularly visit stays open later than others, but even they shut their doors at 6:30. Most of the shops are closed on Sundays, and with this Monday being a holiday in Korea I was facing the prospect of being without my computer for close to three days. To me, that’s no different than being without oxygen.
There is a relatively new mall near the electronics market, with vendors selling many different products. Two or three of the floors are for computer hardware and software. I wasn’t sure what time they close, but I grabbed a cab and headed off. I arrived at 7:45 and learned that the mall shuts down at 8:00. The first few vendors I went to didn’t have the brand I was looking for, neither did their suppliers or neighboring vendors. With time running short, I settled for something I had never heard of, paid quite a bit less than I had expected, and prayed that it would work when I got home.
At home, I pulled out the old power supply and installed the new. The first thing I noticed upon plugging it in was that it runs very, very quietly. Compared to my old unit, it’s like night and day. The old one is a Boeing or Airbus compared to this new one. My wife, sitting across the room when I first plugged it in, exclaimed that I had been cheated. It’s so quiet, she didn’t hear it.
I don’t know how long this new unit will last, if it’s any good, or if I wasted my money. Time will tell. But right now, I’m enjoying the new quiet I have in my home office. If it does prove to be a good buy, I will love to have the same brand in my next box.
For the curious, the new power supply is a 500 watt DP-T500DAF from a Korean company called COMSUM. I had never heard of them before today, nor their power supply brand (Dream Power). The dead unit is a 535 watt EG565P-VE from Enermax. I hope this is the last time I post about power supplies for a long while.
Technorati Tags: COMSUM, Enermax, power supplies, computer hardware
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