## hpr2590 :: Blowing a PC Power Supply

 Greetings Hacker Public Radio listeners, Tony Hughes again coming all the way from Blackpool in the North West of the UK. Originally this show was going to be about some new kit that I have recently bought at my favourite computer auction. However as luck or actually bad luck should have it I fried the power supply on my Desktop machine yesterday as I was setting it up again after moving back to my office.
The PC is a HP Compaq Elite 8300 micro Desk top tower with a i7 3rd generation 3770 3.4Ghz CPU and since upgrades now has 16Gig Ram and a Primary 256Gig SSD. This is my daily driver and I've been running it for a couple of years since I bought it at the said auction. It is the best PC I've ever owned; the full specifications are here:
https://www.cnet.com/products/hp-compaq-elite-8300-cmt-core-i7-3770-3-4-ghz-4-gb-1-tb-b2d12utaba/specs/
As I said I was re setting up my full rig after moving it back to the office upstairs after a temporary move while we had a house guest. As I was plugging in the power cable there was a flash and crack, and a few expletives were uttered, sure enough when I switched of the power at the plug and reconnected the power cable and then tried to power on the PC, it was dead. I was hoping that it was the power supply that had blown and as I had a spare I was not too concerned. However on investigation HP have done the dirty with the design of the motherboard and power supply and neither are standard ATX configuration, yes propriety hardware for this baby.
I was lucky as a few months ago I had picked up a i3 HP using the same case, so I pulled out the power supply from this and fitted it into the i7 PC and luckily that did turn out to be the issue, and the PC sprang into life when I hit the power button. I’m now left with a PC that works, but another one that unless I can find a power supply to match is next to useless except for spares.
Lessons learned, never connect the power cable when the socket is live, if your plug socket doesn't have a switch connect the kettle end to the PC first to reduce the risk of a short like mine. Also never assume that 2nd hand PC’s are standard case/motherboard format as you may have a problem sourcing spares if anything goes wrong as in my case. It’s not the first PC disaster I've had over the years and I can as in this case usually get round them, although not when I bricked the BIOS on a Lenovo x200 one time trying to clear a BIOS password, again I was left with a box of spares which actually came in very handy.
Well that's the end of my tale of woe. I’ll do another episode on the recent trip to the auction and my new laptops shortly. This is Tony Hughes for Hacker Public Radio signing off for now.
