Power Supply Woes...

[Drakmon]

Well, here's the story...

Over the past 6 months or so, I've been having problems with my power supply. About 3-4 times during this period I've had power supplies go and blow up on me, with the resulting power surge frying my hard drive. I get the power supplies from a local Computer Parts and Repair shop (a VERY reputable one), and they always replace my nuked ones for free.

Oh, and I use 'Achieve' 300W Power Supplies for my AMD 1.3 Ghz/256MB SDRAM/etc. machine.

Well, 3 months ago (as of yesterday) I bought what I thought was my last of these power supplies. Yesterday, though... the anniversary of my 3 months with my power supply... everything went down the tube.

I was playing Darkspace online (www.darkspace.net) when all of a sudden the monitor went black and the power went off all at once.

Then the CD-ROM door popped out.

Then... POP! POP! POP!... and an acrid scent wafted up from the computer. I'm familiar with it now as the scent of a dead power supply. Odds are my HD is fried too.

Anyways... I need help. What the heck is causing this, and what can I do? Is it the power supply, or my system causing the problems? I want to stop buying hard drives!! Help!

 

[Newbie237]

Depending on your system configuration (Video Card, HDD, CDRW etc...), the power supply you currently have might be too small, you might try getting a better (more power) one just to see if that makes any difference (and it might) also, please keep in mind that PSU are a very important part of your PC (as you might have noticed ) so do not go cheap on them.

 

[Guest]

If it turns out that a better supply doesn't help, you might look into UPS's. I swear by them and have them on all of my machines.

After I installed my first UPS I realized how necessary they are in my case as the cheap power quality monitor is constantly reminding me with a beep of how terrible my local grid really is.

 

[Crashman]

First of all, get better power supplies, Newegg carries a top quality Fortron 350W unit for $36 that will outpower most 400W units and last longer. Second, consider a UPS to provide better protection against spikes.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[slvr_phoenix]

As has been said, it is possible that your hardware just sucks up too much juice. A better power supply certainly couldn't hurt.

Why I really replied though was to fully I agree with everyone about the UPS and to further state that if you get one to make sure that it has AVR.

<A HREF="http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20031017" target="_new">Then what's your poison of choice?
Soymilk. I was raised on the stuff.
Ah. What's it made of?
Soy.
Is that soy as in soylent green?</A>