Railride's Crossing > Table of Content > Pure Text > Adventures in Computing: The Day the Lights Went Out
July 2002:
My two-week vacation ends with a real downer. But first a little background.
My main PC, a self-built P-III 550, had been running without any major issues
for a couple of years now, if not more (despite the presence of Windows :)
). During the waning days of my 2-week vacation, something odd happened.
After scanning some documents for my parents, I left the machine on since
I wanted to burn the images to CD-R. The existing 2X Yamaha CDRW wasn't so
reliable, so I was going to fire up my laptop, save the files to it via my
home LAN, and burn them using the portable CD writer (visible in "Partners
in Crime") tethered to it's side. I come back to the machine a few hours
later to see my brother turning the system on.
"Um, wasn't that machine on? I coulda swore I left it on after I scanned something".
"No, it was off when I came in".
Bad to Worse
Things started going downhill after that. I got a couple of reports that
the machine had blinked out. Literally shut itself off, as if someone had
flicked the power switch on the back of the machine. Come Friday, I return
from an errand to hear that the machine did it again--and this time it didn't
come back on. No power switch cycling, not even the fans ran. Trouble.
Upon removing the power supply, I get an inkling that maybe I had stressed the thing a bit much. It had scorch marks on the circuit board. It was only a 250W unit. And I had been running off it:
--2 SCSI hard drives (IBM and Quantum)
--SCSI Zip and Jaz
--SCSI CD-ROM (Plextor 12plex) and CD/RW(Yamaha CDRW2260)
...along with an Adaptec 2940UW SCSI adapter, ISA Sound Blaster, PCI modem, and network card and GeForce 2 AGP video. Yeah, I think the power supply toasted itself.
I find out where the next computer show is (the upcoming weekend) and head there Saturday. During the trip, which literally takes me from the North Bronx down to Aqueduct Racetrack, next door to JFK Airport, the subway I'm riding is caught in a Con Ed power failure affecting western Manhattan below 14th Street (a transformer at the 14th Street plant decided to do an impression of a Fourth of July display). But I get out of that and via a series of detours, make my way out the the racetrack, and get into the show.
I picked up a 400 watt Powmax supply. While I'm there, I decide that tmy two SCSI hard drives, neither having more than 400MB free, are in dire need of an upgrade. I buy a Maxtor 60GB drive.
My 2x CD writer is, well, slow. And it makes a lot of coasters. My CD-ROM is a 12x, and while the speed isn't that bad, it is a tad noisy. So I pick up an IDE CD writer and DVD-ROM by LG. I'm buying IDE since it's cheaper and the performance gap with SCSI has narrowed to the point where I won't notice the difference. I also pick up some cool tubular IDE cables with metal braiding, and another casse fan for ventilation. Suitably stocked up, I head home, a three hour journey since Lower Manhattan is still half-blacked out.
I install the new power supply and things fire up. The machine goes into Scandisk, and locks up at about 33%.
Next: Further diagnosis