[PLUG] What's the best way to troubleshoot severe and sudden hardware death?

Carlos Konstanski ckonstanski at pippiandcarlos.com
Sat Nov 11 16:38:49 UTC 2006


> In brief-
> We have a home-built computer that's been working well for the past 5
> years or so.  Yesterday, my spouse added a DIMM to it. It seemed ok,
> although we discovered that it spontaneously rebooted several hours later.
> This morning, it is dead. No activity of any kind when the power is turned
> on, except the USB wireless adapter's LED glows, indicating that it is
> getting power. We removed the added DIMM. No change in behavior, still
> non-responsive.
>
> Question: how do we start troubleshooting this?
>
> Much obliged for any and all bits of help.
>
> --
> David Fleck
> david.fleck at mchsi.com

Power supplies have a safety breaker in them.  I've tripped them just by
touching the case with sufficient static charge built up on my person.
The breaker flips back after a lengthy period of time (half hour?), but
you have to unplug the power cord.

Carlos Konstanski



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