Death Of A Power Supply

Problems are like Chinese boxes, you solve one, you find two more. My house/lab is full of computers and audio gears, tons of problems to solve. Anyway, XP is my favorite system too, 32 and 64 bit. I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one using old computers :-)

MVVblog

I also recommend imaging the disk (which is A Good Thing anyway, because of Justin Case), then boot it under a VM on a Win10 or Linux system.

BobC

SURPRISE BANG been there done that

God 420

I remember reading about that issue with glue on some ATX power supplies one such as the Enermax Liberty series many years ago where such a glue was used that would turn conductive over time.

MrMobodies

I had a few surprises myself on some occasions when I turned on the switch in the back when it was previously working. The sparks were almost like a firework going off only for a second.

MrMobodies

I buy and stock up on the older Enermax power supplies, the ones with the copper heatsinks and brass connectors when they are going cheap on Ebay and I do test them under load as I find them reliable. I have stocked up on plenty of Sata and Molex converters/ leads many years ago with brass/copper kind of connectors which don't seem to gradually bend and cause problems like the cheap thin aluminium ones that I came across. I like the idea of cutting the ATX cables off for scrap wires and very handy when I want a thick small length wire.

MrMobodies

I seriously cannot imagine what you have on that old machine you could not run the same in a VM or even under WINE. Really keeping old hardware around just to run old software seems very redundant these days when basically a Raspberry Pi is probable more powerful and more adaptable than an ancient PC. At some point you really are going to have to walk us through your reasoning.

veritanuda

Dear Fran! I especially like the music... Thank you for info. Best regards. Arnold

I still use firewire, connecting to a Flex 5000A radio. A very nice amateur radio software defined radio.

Kendra Akin

That snot glue can be a serious issue. When it ages and turns brownish, it actually becomes conductive, especially in high humidity conditions. This can be easily verified by breathing on the stuff and then probing it with an ohmmeter. In your ATX supply the failed part was apparently embedded in the stuff, and it's quite possible the glue was the root cause. Many moons ago when I serviced VCRs made by Matsushita (Panasonic), a common complaint was that the machine would malfunction in rainy weather. An easy fix, just scrape off the old glue on the system control board and replace with RTV if needed.

I’ve still got firewire cables around. Periodically I find them when looking for USB cables. From memory I mostly had firewire external hard drives, back when USB was too slow for external drives! Ewen

Ewen McNeill

Fireworks and magic smoke always keep things interesting :)

You are on fire (wire), Fran, pumping out interesting videos. I'm looking forward to see what explodes the next time.

Simon Mikkelsen

Depending on the size and the write/erase use of the drives you should switch to a solid state for the boot and probably a mechanical for stuff that is constantly written or erased

William

Weeeeeeee... BANG! Hate when that happens!

William Alsing