Stupid Power Supplies
 

It looks like my power supply has died. Again.

Amazing. I've been waiting for my old hard drives to croak -- I kept adding capacity, but who throws out a working drive? The oldest two of the four are ~4 years old and for some reason haven't died yet. When they do, I can finally toss them and free up a lot of space.

But no such luck with power supplies. This is the third to die in the past several years. (Only one of them was a direct result of my incompetence, but I didn't expect it to go down that easy ;) )

Of these two components notorious for failure, which has given you the most trouble?

Ha, only 4 years on those two harddrives, thats pathetic, I've got close to 10 on some of mine :), and as far as power supplies go, they're always goin bad on me.

The power supply on my friends Dell Laptop actually melted to the wall (dying in the process). I saw it myself, and you can actually see the spot on the wall where it attached to.

ROFLMFAO, thats great, what type of Dell laptop, i only ask because i have one and want to make sure mine wont do the same.

Power supply? Never failed. HDD? Never failed. Motherboard for Athlon processor, you betch ya'. Other than that, I have never had anything really die on me. I have gone threw lots of DVD burners though, and the odd small toy.

I've only had a sound card and a video card die on me.

video cards, monitors, memory, hard drives, processors, and mother boards have all died on me at one point in time or another. The last 5 years or so, I've only lost video cards, monitors, and memory. Weird things happen when you try to build clusters. :)

Dell Inspiron 5100.

How many Watts is your current Power Supply? Have you thought about getting a bigger one? I only ask because I know it's not when there is to much power being sucked from the power supply.

PhilBon, that was actually the case.. Dell didn't supply my buddy with a proper power supply. It was a fire hazard from the beginning. I actually have the Inspiron 5150 model (the same laptop, following years model) and the power cord was upgraded from what he had.