Urgent tech help needed... weird current levels? in Off Topic

ID:193662
 
Nov 22 2001, 6:40 pm
Hey all, thought I'd see if anyone here knew anything about this subject. The short story:

My PC will no longer boot if the power cord goes into a surge protector (as of today). Tried three different surge protectors (two brands), all of which appear to work fine, and with which I've never had a problem before. Tried different power cords too.

When I try to boot when plugged into a surge protector, the power light comes on, the fan comes on, and the drives make a second or two of powering up whirring noises, but nothing else happens. No video signal is sent to the monitor, and the PC is otherwise silent.

My questions are these:

Anyone ever hear of anything like this?
What could possibly be the cause of this, degradation of current stability?
How could the current level be different with and without the surge protector?
What most likely changed in the last day... my PC, or the AC?
Should I be calling my power company to come by and check the lines?

I'd appreciate any info, theoretical or anecdotal. I am very nervous about using my PC as I type this, since it is not at the moment protected from line spikes.
#1 Nov 22 2001, 7:20 pm
Try changing the voltage setting on the back of your computer.

a computer converts AC power to DC, and that voltage settings switches it to fit your needs.

its a little red switch near the fan

hope this helps, if not, reply and ill see what i can do, im in A++ certification courses, and i have a good deal of electronic knowledge.

FIREking
#2 Nov 22 2001, 7:33 pm
Skysaw wrote:
My PC will no longer boot if the power cord goes into a surge protector (as of today). Tried three different surge protectors (two brands), all of which appear to work fine, and with which I've never had a problem before. Tried different power cords too.

When I try to boot when plugged into a surge protector, the power light comes on, the fan comes on, and the drives make a second or two of powering up whirring noises, but nothing else happens. No video signal is sent to the monitor, and the PC is otherwise silent.

One more thing you should try: Try moving to a different outlet in the house, preferably on a different circuit, and trying that. If that works, or works differently, you know your power source is at least partly to blame.

Failing that, I have two theories: 1) The BIOS on your motherboard went kablam! all of a sudden. 2) The power supply for your case bit the dust.

Now, I've heard of similar things blamed on power supply before, and it's not inconceivable that they fail. However, in my experience every time a tough-to-diagnose problem is finally chalked up to a bad power supply, something else turns out to be the culprit instead. Motherboard failures, on the other hand, are much more common; they don't happen constantly, but they happen often enough to make that the first place you check. (Realistically this makes sense if you think about it. Power supply circuits are by no means simple, but they're far and away less complicated designs than motherboards, and there are fewer parts that can go bad.)

In this case, it probably really is the power supply, though, because your system works under unfiltered power. At a guess, I'd say that there's some circuit in the supply that got fried, and now no longer works properly with any kind of filtered current input. I'd advise against just wantonly changing around voltages on the supply as FIREking suggested, unless you want to fry the rest of the computer as well.

Lummox JR