Power Supplies

The "No User-Serviceable Parts Inside" sign on the cover of your PC power supply lies.

This weekend I decided that I had to deal with the evil fan on my router's power supply, which sounded like teeth drilling in my personal house. I first tried swapping out the whole thing -- but although the replacement power supply powered up the motherboard just fine and I could edit the ROM BIOS OK, it gave a "floppy boot failure" when I tried to start the machine, no matter what diskette was in the boot drive. I changed out the floppy drive and still no joy.

But it worked fine when I put the old, noisy power supply back in. I noticed some APM stuff in the BIOS, so perhaps this had an effect. Alas, there was no way in hell or earth I was gonna put up with the evil fan, so I took a deep breath, gritted my teeth, and opened the power supply in spite of the warnings and the "warranty void if removed" sticker. Evil daimons live in there -- the kind that can throw you across the room or kill you. To my surprise, I found that the fan was held in by four screws and a modular connector. I swapped the fan from the other power supply in, put everything back together, and found that the machine booted. Best of all, it ran quietly.

It would only go to run level 3 if APM was turned off in the BIOS -- otherwise, the machine blanks the screen and halts during init. Go figure.

-- CharlesShapiro - 22 Oct 2001

Just be sure to avoid shorting any capacitors while digging around in there. If they still hold a charge from when they were powered up, you will discover a new definition of pain!