System powers down on startup - the fix.

[BrettH]

Posted this in early May - system would power up until it initialised the video card, then power off. Too tedious to go into much detail, but I eventually tried with only kbd, mouse and RAM on the mobo. No video, no ribbon cables, no cpu, nothing. Still did it. Gave POST error for bad video and shut off. New (different brand) mobo did the same thing. Was pretty unhappy at this point.

The fix? Move the PC to a different power point in the wall. Bit of a *****, huh? Didn't know whether to be happy that it worked, or pissed that it was something I couldn't do anything about.

Took a while to get back to this because I moved house - no, not because of that :-/

Hope this helps someone out there!

[800XL]

I ran into a similar case oncee where I had even more odd problems. Most noticable was an intermittant CD-ROM problem. The drive would work fine for a very little while, then just lock up requiring me to shut down the machine just to get it to open. I moved the machine to a different room and the problem was gone.
I discovered the source of the problem when I plugged a surge protector strip into that outlet in the wall a while later. The site wiring fault light lit up on the strip for a second when I plugged it in and then went out. I figured that was just from me plugging it in and went back to what I was doing. The familiar smell of burning electronics filled the air soon after. The outlet had one of the hot wires connected to the ground prong. That poor power strip tried to warn me, but the light could only handle being a 120V short to ground for a few seconds.

When you thing about it, I wonder how many tech support calls are generated from aging or improper wiring like this? There are a lot of poorly wired apartments and ancient houses in the world, you would think that this is not such an uncommon thing.

[BrettH]

Agreed, it would cause a lot of probs. The weird thing in my case is that I'd had 3 separate PCs running through this same power outlet before, using a surge protector all the time, and it only surfaced when I transferred one system to a different case.
Oh well, stranger things.

[Bleeding Edge]

This is extremely interesting. This is something that is over looked a lot.

I've always thought that dips in the house current would cause corrupt data being written to the drive. Accumulating affects over a period of time. These dips happen much more frequently and go unnoticed compared to the damaging spikes. I'm sure some homes are worse than others.

I do my best with a line-conditioner at home. It helps to get a clean flow of current to the PC and peripherals. A decent one is kinda expensive. On one critical system we have dual in line conditioners. One is a rackmount Tripplite and the other is a custom built power supply with it's own transformer that weighs a ton! The voltage readings in the Bios are rock steady.

[BrettH]

Edge,
I agree re the line conditioner idea. I'm seriously considering a UPS w/ line filter and having a sparky check the wiring, and/or install a separate circuit for PCs only. With so much sensitive (& expensive!) hardware riding on the power supply, it has to be worth spending a bit on getting decent power to it.

I doubt the BIOS power readings would be much use. I think if the spike/sag/surge was enough to detect in your BIOS you'd notice it elsewhere, especially since these things tend to be very transient. Put it this way, if I noticed fluctuations in the BIOS power readings I'd be *seriously* worried.

[philipg]

WOW these are some intereseting post.

When I moved back in February to and old house apartment I went out and bought a little tester that has 3 neon lights that tell you if the 3 wires are connected correctly. Good thing I did since over half the ground wire was cut before it entered the box. and the only one that was wired correctly was a 2 prong plug with BX cable(metal shielded cable). I also went around with a voltage tester and had to find the one line that was the most stable in drops due to say the microwave kicking on. Then after all this I install a line monitoring (not a conditioner) surge protecting power strips on all sensitive equipment.

I haven't had a problem yet the voltage stays between 121-123VAC for my computer and 120-124VAC for the Audio and Video equipment.