Thoughts regarding Power Surge and its Effects on a PC?

[Andrew Kulin]

Got this e-mail from my Uncle who is also into CM (BB). Earliest I'd be able to get out and look at his PC would be over the weekend. Any thoughts on how bad this is? Best case sounds like he'll need a new power supply or Windows re-install. Worst case is, well, ..., worse.

I have asked (and am waiting for a reply) if he has a surge protector/power bar. Anyhow, here's his e-mail. I can't give much in way of his system specs. I believe he's running XP Home, has a 2.0 GHz Pentium/Celeron, on a pretty low-end mobo, a Geforce-1 Videocard (32 MB). Thanks for whatever insights you guys can provide.

"About 4 wks ago we had what I suspect was a power surge while this PC was running.

I heard what sounded like a circuit breaker clack in the machine at which point everything died.

For some reason, the only way I could get the machine back up was to wait about 20 min and then flick the switch on the back of the PC.

I've now had 3 similar hits where it seems to happen if the machine has been running about an hr and I bang the table with the arms of my chair. On these occasions, it tries to restart itself but is incredibly slow. It took 15 min just to get to my main Windows screen but the mouse pointer was almost totally unresponsive.

If I switch off the power at the back of the machine and wait 20 min before switching it back on, everything's back to normal. This suggests a loose connection with the main breaker flipping out.

However, I've deliberately shaken the machine after 30 min and get no reaction."

[Redwolf]

Broken power supply. I don't think it was a surge from the AC net, probably just dying on its own. The Russian front puts us all to the stress test.

He needs to be careful, a broken power supply can fry all his components at once, including the harddrive (which means all data). Would kinda suck.

Best not to turn it back on again before inserting a new power supply.

Slow start is pretty odd, maybe something secondary is already damaged. Mostly likely the harddrive cable came loose when he banged the PC with the arms of his chair and now the PC is popping in and out of advanced IDE modes.