Aug 20
i’ve run out of creative titles
Well my weekend has been rather eventful. After the formal on Friday night I got home to find my computer not switching on. I pulled it apart and concluded that the power supply was to blame, so after pulling the power supply apart I discovered a blown fuse, which meant that I would have to buy a new power supply. So I went down to Dick Smith Electronics at Carnegie and bought a 420W PSU which would supply all my power needs. Since my computer was apart I decided to clean all the dust out with a couple of cans of pressurized air, so I went back to DSE and bought two cans for $16. I then preceded to spend all of Saturday afternoon removing the fan off my processer, graphics card and I of course pulled out all the RAM etc.
So after deciding that everything was indeed clean enough, I began to assemble everything again which took me about 30 minutes, I then preceded to install my new dual fan power supply. I switched my computer on and everything was working for about 15 min and then all of a sudden this strange noise starting coming from the computer, so I shut it down and pulled the cover off and discovered that there was nothing wrong with it that I could SEE, so I pulled some cables out and plugged them back in. I then put the cover back on and powered up, this time an error message came up on the screen telling me that I need to insert a boot disk, which surely meant that I was having a hard drive problem. So I pulled the cover off again and found that the IDE cable leading to the Hard Drive was loose, so I put it back in correctly, I then decided to boot up with the cover of the PC off so that I could see inside while it was booting. So after powering up again the suspicous noise was still coming from the PC, so I spent a good 30min trying to discover what was wrong before I realised that I had forgotten to screw the fan back onto the graphics card after I had cleaned it, so when I put the computer back (vertically) the fan had fallen down beside the graphics card and was hitting my LAN card. So after two trips to DSE, $116 (for the cans of air and power supply) and 3 hours I successfully got my computer running again.
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420 watts? Not bad. When I had to replace my powersupply, I actually had to do it twice since the first one I bought didn’t have the six-pin connector for my video card.
Why the damn thing even needs a power supply I don’t quite understand. What the hell is the wall plug for then? As you can see, a technical master I am not.
I could have done the same work for free:
If its a blown fuse then you obviously don’t want it to blow again so remove it and replace it with your standard metal object (eg. screwdriver), if it’s a solder in job then any dipstick could fix it with a random bit of wire. Also mixing and matching fuses with power supplys from the strip might work.
To clean the computer I usually use the ol’ vaccuum cleaner and two fine brushes I bought to do it specially (One with soft bristles and one with harder bristles). When it come time to putting your computer back together most people will see when objects like a fan aren’t mounted, but you’re special. Also try to check things like cables in the future and you won’t have the problems.
Yes, I had a bed day and this is as good a place as any to vent! (Good work on fixing it though, it would have taken my dad weeks to figure it out)
p.s. When a PC won’t start at all another good thing to check is that the power switch is plugged into the motherboard, so many people have overlooked such a simple thing (including my brother when i don’t want him using my PC)
Yeah it was a blown fuse, however my old power supply was only 250W so I decided to upgrade rather than fix it, and I use compressed air because it doesn’t generate static electricity like vacuum cleaners do which has a remote possibility of causing damage to some components of the PC.
If you are unlucky enough to have a vaccuum cleaner toast your pc then it *must* be time for a new one