[wellylug] 2nd blown up powersupply

[Tony Wills]

At 20:53 13/04/2005, Jethro wrote:
>...I've just had my second blown up powersupply, since november in my
>desktop. The power supply is a "Thermaltake W0035RAD, Silent Purepower
>410W ATX PSU".
...

I was going to say that although I've worked with computer hardware for 20 
years I hardly ever see a power supply that blows up unless either the fan 
dies and it over heats or someone switches it to 120V input instead of 
240V.  But I decided not to bother as my comments weren't really very 
helpful ;-)

Today I pulled out of my pile of useful junk an oldish computer (PII 
350MHz) that I've had sitting around for a while and plugged it in - 
flash!, bang!, smoke! from the power supply - worked fine last time I used 
it! ... double checked that the input voltage was set to 240V, checked the 
mains voltage (233V according to my multimeter), looked out the window - 
fine day not much lightning about.  Opened up the power supply, no not a 
blown fuse or exploded capacitor, just a black area on the circuit board 
and a burnt out coil.

Oh I thought, a bit of bad luck, ok such things happen, just some faulty 
component.  So I reset the circuit breaker, pulled out another identical 
computer (well identical model), made sure it was switched off.  Plugged 
everything in, switched on ... for half a second nothing happened, then 
flash!, bang!, smoke! from the power supply.

At this point I decided to go back to bed rather than investigate whether 
both power supplies have taken everything else with them (ram, cpu, 
motherboard, harddisk, cdrom ?).  Now dead power supplies don't usually 
take out everything but this doesn't seem to be a usual occurrence and I'm 
not really sure that I want to know, I'm not feeling very lucky :-(

Tony.