AmateurRadio.com

Last Sunday Julie and I were on our way out the door and I wanted to check some directions before we left. I went off to the computer to look something up and as I turned the PC on a POPPING sound was heard…..then nothing! My six year old PC failed to start, absolutely nothing was happening. There was no time to look into it now we were heading out the door. Early that evening when at home I tried the power button on the PC again (maybe somehow the computer god's looked after things for me) it was the same….nothing. The tower has to come out from it's cubby in the roll top desk and opened for further investigation. I first made up a diagram of where all the USB cables, monitor cables, audio

Faulted part

cables and serial cables went so all could be placed back in the same place. I suspected the power supply was the problem and hoping I could find a reset button on the unit once the side panels were taken off the tower. I was not so lucky there  was no reset button but there sure was a noticeable burning smell and it was coming from the power supply. It was easy to remove the power supply from the PC but not without labelling what cables went where on the mother board. Doing similar things in the past I have said to my self "no need to write it down it's simple and straight forward" boy has that lie got me into some troubles in the past! With the power supply out and not yet opened I did notice the
power supply fan was missing some blades. Once the supply was opened up I quickly found the faulted

Cables everywhere

transistor. With the broken fan and faulted transistor it was time for a new power supply.
The old supply was a 500 watts supply the new one is 750 and can be used with a new PC when I decide to build one. The new supply fit perfectly into the tower and there sure were lots more cables on this supply! I ended up using only 5 of the some 20 cables so the rest were tucked away in an open bay for future use. With all the cables plugged into the mother board, hard drives and CD drive and the spare cables were as I said tucked away. Before putting the side panels back on it was time to plug in the new supply and power up the PC. I then pushed the power button and NOTHING!!!! Ok I said lets  try that again…..NOTHING!!!  First thing that came to mind was, did the faulted power supply take something else with it?? It was time to take a breath and think of my next step, time to recheck all the mother board connections.  After all I did take time to clean the dust off the board while the side panels were off

Ready to power up

maybe I loosened or disconnected something in my cleaning frenzy. All seemed good on the motherboard it was time to recheck the power supply again. It could be possible that even thought the supply is new it is defective? I checked that there was AC making it to the supply, that the proper connecters were used on the mother board and that I did not forget any connections. It was then I noticed on one connector did not seem to be seating right. This was a connector that had an "option" of adding 4 extra connections. It was a 20 pin connector but some mother boards were 24 pins as mine was a 24 pin. The connector had the 24 pin setup ready to go as it was snapped into place so I just plugged it into the board….very straight forward I thought……NOT…….there was also clear tape holding the extra 4 pin connector in place and this tape stopped the connector from seating firmly on the  main board and thus the PC not starting!  With the tape removed and 24 pin connector firmly seated the PC came to life! I am happy to say that all has been working well and the PC seems to run cooler and not as noisy ass the old power supply. I did notice some software hiccups once I was up and running.

The problem found

Some of the USB ports changed their ports on me. My K3 now wants to be com 3 and not com 4 anymore. This had me change around some radio software. Also when the PC booted  a bios page came up (never a good sign) asking me some questions about the type of start up I wanted??? This only happened once and all is good now but really not sure what that was all about I only replaced a power supply?? Oh and finally Oliver was in on the action too, he was fine with no PC and a new cubby.

If you look hard Oliver can be found