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

[David Fleck]

>On Sat, 11 Nov 2006, Rich Shepard wrote:
>> And I've had two power supplies fail over the years. First thing I'd do 
>> is get a good power supply (I like the Antec quiet ones) and replace 
>> what's in there.

On Sat, 11 Nov 2006, Jim Webb wrote:
> I concur with Rich.  And I might add that a bad power supply can fry your
> board or it might have been vice versa in my case.
 
We swapped in a power supply from another machine, and the box in question 
started to boot up. We got some complaints from the CMOS, probably because 
we cleared its memory in our attempts to get the machine to respond. So 
that, combined with the voltmeter readings, make it looks like we need a 
new power supply.

Here's a new question: could simply adding in a stick of memory (256MB 
PC-3200 400Mhz) fry a power supply? Or is that mere coincidence? This 
particular memory stick ran fine in my wife's machine for several years.

She replaced it with a single 512MB PC-2700 333Mhz DIMM, which freed up 
the other stick to go into a third machine. Adding that DIMM to the third 
machine seemed to start this chain of failure.

The mobo on the dead machine is an MSI K7T266 Pro2, whose manual only 
mentions using PC-1600 and PC-2100 memory.

--
David Fleck
david.fleck at mchsi.com