This morning, I got up to find my main computer powered off after I left it on overnight for a spyware scan by Webroot Spy Sweeper. After satisfying myself that it was dead, I tried popping a new fuse in the plug. What I saw next was far from being a pretty sight: shorting in the PSU. The fact that it took out a new 5 A fuse was neither here nor there (they are 20p a piece at where I replenished my supply: they may be cheaper elsewhere but what’s 20p these days?); thoughts of fried PC hardware are far from pleasant, especially the vision of losing data and expensive software purchases because a hard drive got fried by a shorting PSU. A whole new bare-bones system from the likes of Novatech was appearing very ominously on my horizon.
There was only one thing for it: try another PSU and see if everything works. So, it was off to a nearby branch of PC World for a replacement. While I know that there were other options, I preferred to get this problem sorted out pronto to put my mind at ease, if at all possible. The old PSU got taken out and the new one plugged in as part of pre-installation testing. Thankfully, I saw the Windows start up screen and the omens were good; it later turned out that my data had not been harmed either. Initial problems with keyboard and mouse recognition were resolved by a reboot, as was an IP address conflict that had resulted because my back-up machine was on throughout all of this. All in all, things turned out well after a solid lesson in backing up data outside the PC on which it resides. Maybe an online service such as Diino could be very useful.
I do seem to have an issue with PSU’s giving up the ghost; perhaps it's the fact that I run them overnight a lot. This incident caused to upgrade from a 450 W Jeantech unit to a 500 W one. Though the PSU that I had before the 450 W unit was higher rated, it couldn’t cope with the power demands of the machine it was powering up. The result was that it cut out a lot at start-up time, an annoying habit that I tolerated for longer than I really should. I’ll keep an eye on things as I go…