PCA Forums

With all the storms and subsequent power surges, I've been seeing a lot of PSU failures, but this smells fishy. I've had 5 Bestec PSUs - all in 2 - 3 year old Compaq Presario SRxxx series PCs, fail in the last few weeks. It's getting monotonous.

The PSU itself almost always tests fine on a digital PSU tester - it starts and the voltages are in the green BUT it won't work on the mobo unless you unplug it from the mobo to reset it and then it will power up once. Drop an Antec Basiq 500 PSU in there (yeah, not my #1 choice for a PSU but I can get them locally and they're still better than the average OEM crap) to replace it and it works fine.

I've tested these PSUs at home on a sacrificial bench PC (an old Athlon 2000+) and they won't reliably power up.

I suspect it's the PSU's fault detection circuit. Classic symptom is the green light on the back of the PSU flashes which usually means the PSU thinks there's a fault (a short for instance) and won't power on to protect the PC.

Methinks Compaq bought some shitty PSUs. Reminds me of the crappy PSUs that eMachines used to come with 6 years ago.

Yup, Those are complete junk. I have seen a large number of those fail. All of which were in HP and Compaqs. Yeah, would agree with the eMachines comment too. People really need a good UPS to protect their stuff, surges and brownouts are really rough on computers.

Yah, I haven't had any recently, but a couple of months ago, we had a run of about 8 or 9 bad ones. Some chinzy Raptor brand..

Funny, I just swapped out one of those a couple days ago. It wasn't the first either. You're right also, it works just fine if you force it. I had a friend that had been grounding the green wire to turn his computer on for the last two years. Finally got sick of it. It had the flicker of death too.

Had two today, one E-machine and the other a Compaq.