Thread: Power supply testing

No, they will not do that.
I have one and you can plug in MB plug, a HD power plug, a floppy power plug and a sata plug. All they will do it light up which power rails are correct. Unless you want to sit there and see if the leds start to flicker.
You could leave it on and wiggle wires in case thats the issue.
But they do work for what they are designed to do.
Peter

Bugger. See the computer can work fine for hours at a time before suddenly it locks. I know that some have an audible alarm. Maybe that would do what I need, as long as I am in earshot?

Only thing I can suggest is.
1, Open the side and make sure the fans are not covered in dust and are spinning. Both the CPU fan and the Power supply fan.
2. Leave the side off to see if its a heat problem. I have one machine I never put the side on.
3. check the capacitors, The little round coke cans, If the top of any has popped like a coke can in the freezer then its dying. If they are all flat they should be good. They can sometimes pop so bad they split the cross in the top and ooze goo.
4. run virus software, not sure what level of locking your getting, a reboot, just a freeze or what.
Peter

It has the side off at present, and still get the locks. CPU fan and heatsink were recently dusted, but they weren't too bad anyway. There are also two case fans, which are fine. I run software (either speedfan or PC probe, I alternate a bit) and haven't got any temp alarms. Checking the caps is a good idea. Haven't done that yet. Normally what happens is I will be working on the computer, not usually anything CPU or graphics intensive (basic web browsing usually) and it will just reboot as if the front panel reset switch had been pushed. Sometimes there will be very large font blue writing on the screen first (but it's garbled and can't make out the text) I'm using built in graphics, so if it's a graphics issue then it's a MB issue anyway, if that makes sense.

Unless you have an unusual box that needs special consideration, power supplies are very cheap. Throw in a new one and see what happens.

Its the blue screen of death.
check microsoft site as it writes a log file somewhere for those, look for blue screen of death log file.
it will be irq issue I guess. It will also tell you what device driver is causing the issue, more likely software than hardware. My old man gets it everytime he does a windows update and takes microsofts hardware updates (never good).
Can happen when it gets to a certain point in memory. Like if you use 70% or memory most of the time, but when you hit 80% and that chip is faulty it could reboot.

Best to look for that log file as it will tell you where its unhappy.

OK, may be onto something. I have run memtest86+ and three passes of that found no fault, so I am ruling out memory for now. I found out how to find and read the BSOD dumps. I don't understand a lot of it (would need to look up all the hex), but all except one time the process that it didn't like was chrome.exe. That may be coincidence as chrome is on pretty much all the time this computer is on, but it may be worth investigating. Left with a dilemma though. I changed to Chrome because Firefox was very slow over several versions with flash games, which my wife plays a fair bit. Chrome was great with those. May have to look into safari or even go back to IE (shudder)

If chrome is unhappy, something thats part of chrome may be the problem.
You could reinstall it over the top and see if that fixes it.

I've been getting the occasional BSOD, but only since installing an SSD hard drive and doing some O/S tweaks that supposedly improve SSD performance.

I initially thought it might be due to having the swap file switched off, but with 8 gig of RAM that seems a bit far fetched.

Come to think of it, my BSODs have been while web browsing....maybe I'll have to look at the logs.....

One quick check is to hit the num lock key and if it chances with the light on or off, via the keyboard then you can be certain that the system is still thinking and not frozen.