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[LUG] Power supplies - what to do? - was Re: resurrection day

 

Julian Hall wrote:
> Neil Williams wrote:
>> All I need is a power supply to resurrect my Pentium 1 90MHz.
> Ebay has a section specifically for AT PSUs.  Some ATX have slipped in, 
> but £5 for a 200W AT PSU seems reasonable.  +PnP of course ;)
> 
> from www.ebay.co.uk :  Categories > Computing > Desktop PC Components > 
> Power Supplies > AT Power Supplies

I think the power supply thing is a general problem.

They are sold as items of which no maintenance is recommended, and
(usually) contain a fan.

The fan stops or jams, or simply slows down, and then they overheat and die.

At work it was very noticeable that power supplies were the first thing
 cannibalised from old machines. We'd usually strip disk, CPU, and
memory, but I think I've only ever used power supplies (and the odd
strip of memory if it happened to fit a machine that was being repaired
for something else - usually power supply failures just occasionally
disk drive failures).

However it also points the problem with second-hand kit - if the power
supply is old it will almost certainly die soon.

You can get generic power supplies, with a wide selection of connectors,
 which will fit pretty much any old desktop PC. But the pricing is such
that it is hard to justify a new power supply at retail price (and
shipping), when new kit is so cheap.

Depressingly I've had a couple of boxes with dying power supply fans,
and on inspection the fans were all on fit and forget type plastic
mounts, the fans all had different sizes and connectors.

Perhaps the answer is fanless power supplies. Most boxes I've seen the
power supply is rated for a much higher power than the PC requires. Most
of the PCs were 1 or 2 disks, onboard graphics card, and regular
motherboard and CPU. I dare say if we filled the drive bays, and
expansion slots.

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