Misadventures with a new power supply

My gaming PC at home, which runs Windows XP, had been having random crashes for months. Not a lot of them, but at least one a week, and always at the worst time. What was weird was that, seconds before it crashed, both my mouse and keyboard (both USB) would stop working, and XP would play the common “device disconnected” sound.

Since I have a lot of stuff connected to that PC, and only a “puny” 300W supply, which, besides, was guilty of making an increasing amount of noise, I thought that maybe the power supply didn’t have enough power for so many devices. I don’t know whether that was it or not…

So, yesterday, I bought a new 400W “silent” power supply, and replaced the old one with it. Several things happened as a result of that.

First, I cut myself under a nail. Quite painful, trust me.

Second, my 3Com 905B network card, for some reason, stopped working. Really. Weird thing: on first boot, it didn’t even recognize what it was, just identified it as a “network card” for which it didn’t have drivers, and was unable to configure it. On next boot, it was recognized, but had no connectivity at all. Removed it, booted, inserted it again, booted, and same symptoms: “unknown network card” on first boot, then correctly identified (but not working) on the second one.

Luckily, I had a couple of other network cards in a drawer…

Third, while the power supply’s fan was the noisiest one, now that I replaced it, I discovered that the CPU fan is making almost as much noise. I had stopped each fan by hand to find out which one was making all that noise, and came to the conclusion that it was the power supply’s fan, which I couldn’t stop since there’s a grid in front of it (all right, technically I could open it, but…). It was the worst, sure, but the CPU fan is still bothersome. I have to buy a new one.

Well, so far, it hasn’t crashed. Let’s see what the future brings.

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