new power supply for a nine-year-old PC?!

[lost_soul]

At my mom's house, there sits a PC I purchased in 2002. It has a 2.53 GHz CPU and 1 GB of RAM. They use it as a backup machine for browsing the web. The power supply had been acting strangely for a few months now, and it appears to finally have died. Now, since this system is an OEM machine made by one of the worst manufacturers on planet earth, the power supply is a proprietary size. It is about an inch shorter than your traditional ATX power supply, and even a PSU from a Sony VAIO is too wide to fit. Is it worth fixing?

 

Maybe I should just give them my old laptop which only has half a gig and load Linux on it, so it would still browse the web just fine. No way you could run XP AND a modern malware protection suite on half a gig though.

[demagogue]

You could get a recent used laptop for dirt cheap, like $100-$200 that's better than that PC ... check amazon & craigslist & ebay, etc, especially if this is just for web browsing.

[New Horizon]

At my mom's house, there sits a PC I purchased in 2002. It has a 2.53 GHz CPU and 1 GB of RAM. They use it as a backup machine for browsing the web. The power supply had been acting strangely for a few months now, and it appears to finally have died. Now, since this system is an OEM machine made by one of the worst manufacturers on planet earth, the power supply is a proprietary size. It is about an inch shorter than your traditional ATX power supply, and even a PSU from a Sony VAIO is too wide to fit. Is it worth fixing?

 

Maybe I should just give them my old laptop which only has half a gig and load Linux on it, so it would still browse the web just fine. No way you could run XP AND a modern malware protection suite on half a gig though.

 

If you're feeling adventurous, you could take the housing off the PSU and see if any of the capacitors are bulging / leaking. If they are, it's really not too hard to grab the number off of them and get a couple of new ones. I fixed the power supply in my old desktop for $2.

[Unstoppable]

If you're feeling adventurous, you could take the housing off the PSU and see if any of the capacitors are bulging / leaking. If they are, it's really not too hard to grab the number off of them and get a couple of new ones. I fixed the power supply in my old desktop for $2.

 

Yea but you know exactly what you're doing, I wouldn't advise this option. Try to see if you can find a power supply that will fit that computer or new case+power supply. Same motherboard and rest of the stuff should work.

[Xarg]

A new case and power supply are quite cheap these days, and it gets you away from being tied to custom size proprietary junk. I'd advise that, if you wish to keep the rest of the system. Failing that, look at auction sites, or enquire at local schools or corporates. Corporates often donate old hardware they no longer use, usually HP/Dell/Compaq SFF (small form factor) cases, you might be able to score a 2.0ghz Celeron SFF for little/no money, and just place the old hdd inside it.

[Serpentine]

I'd go with the laptop, that P4 power consumption will most likely cost the difference in any case

 

I recently moved my mum's old HP 2005 laptop to running FreeBSD+KDE4, move it to 1.5gb of mem and cleaned the heatpipes while repasting the thermal interfaces... it's running nice and smoothly even with compositing enabled - I'm quite happy with a few modifications it's idling at almost half the kW/h value that it was getting in XP. Migration of Thundershit to KMail was painless, skype is running under linux emulation and seems fine and scanning is far better than the horrid HP software. The rest of the system maintains itself nicely... ahh yes.

[lost_soul]

So, I got another power supply for $35 and it seems defective. The machine does not start no matter what with the new power supply. However, if I connect the bigger power supply that won't fit in the case, the machine works just fine. Now the plan is to transfer all the components out of this old case into another spare one and use the power supply that was originally too big. Hopefully that will work.

 

After that, I would love to take a bat or hammer to this old m-ATX case!

[Xarg]

If that's the case, see if you can return that defective power supply and use that 35 dollars to get yourself something nice

[lost_soul]

Okay, I fixed it. I just re-built the system in an old Sony Vaio case. The case wasn't originally compatible, but I "made" it compatible by cutting the power switches out of the two cases and swapping them. The Sony's cord was too short and it had lots of extra pins for front lighting which nobody really needs anyway.

Edited April 25, 2011 by lost_soul