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Power Supply Troubleshooting

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A computer power supply is one of the most important pieces of hardware in your computer, it's responsible for supplying power to the rest of your hardware components

Reasons a power supply fails

Power supplies fail for a number of reasons:

• Electricity and voltage spikes
• Dust, smoke
• Age
• Fan failure or heating issues

If you live in a place with a lot of voltage spikes, I suggest you get a voltage regulator outlet or a backup (this usually comes with this feature) and will prolong your power supply life over time. Clean your fans at least once a year even if you live in a clean place, dust can play a significant part in hardware failures, from fans not working to hardware connectors not working well because of dust.

Failure symptoms

Power supply failures can be similar to the ones the motherboard has,

• Computer doesn't power on
• Computer turns on for just a few seconds
• Computer freezes or displays blue screens when booting or playing games

 

When your power supply fails, DON'T OPEN IT it's not worth your time, usually when a power supply fails it's due to a voltage capacitor and it's highly likely you don't have the capacitor to replace or the experience, my suggestion is to replace this power supply with a new one.

Another thing you can do, is using a multimeter to check the pin with the red cable and see if it has 12V, the power supply symptoms can be often be confused with other hardware components, and the best way to know for sure it's using a spare power supply.

If you are doing a test on a power supply in your computer, just connect the important parts: hard drive and motherboard, leave the rest out this way you can easily pinpoint the hardware problem.

If the problem still persists with the new or spare power supply then the problem can be motherboard or CPU, in my experience

Prolong your power supply life

The best way to keep a power supply running for years is getting a voltage regulator or backup and cleaning it once in a while with the can of compressed air. If you are playing games, get a power supply with at least 100-200 watts more than your requirements, I usually recommend a 750 watts for a single video card.

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