Some Like It Reliable 3
January 17th, 2009 by ComputerBob
This is part of one of my many do-it-yourself adventures.
Late yesterday afternoon, I reinstalled my removable hard drive frames into my PC’s case, reinstalled my hard drives into their removable hard drive trays, and slid the removable trays back into their frames.
Then I installed my PC’s new power supply.
One of the reasons that I chose that particular power supply was because it has plenty of 4-pin, +12volt connectors on 2 different rails, with plenty of power to drive my PCs internal devices and fans. I wasn’t disappointed. Both the motherboard power connector and all of the 4-pin connectors fit perfectly and slid onto their devices very securely. As an added bonus, each of the power supply’s cables are about 2 feet long, making it easy to route them to their proper locations.
On power-up, I went into my PCs BIOS and immediately noticed that it had reset itself back to its factory defaults. It took me a few minutes to reset its clock to the correct date and time; reset its motherboard front side bus speed from its default 100 MHz back to the proper 133 MHz for my AMD Athlon 2100+ CPU; and reset many other BIOS settings to my preferred values.
(A few hours later, after I had to manually reset all of my BIOS settings a few more times, I finally realized that my motherboard’s CMOS battery, now 6 years old, must be dead, so I replaced it at a cost of $4.68 for two of them at Walmart, and that solved the problem. The dead CMOS battery is a problem that only occurs once every several years, so it always takes me awhile to realize it.)
Then I exited the BIOS (saving my BIOS settings) and booted up into Debian Linux.
The scrolling lines of bootup text all looked normal during the boot process. But after the desktop appeared, a small error message popped up in the middle of the screen, saying something like “the file process suddenly died.”
Not knowing what that error message meant, I didn’t want to take the chance of using my PC and possibly corrupting some other file(s), so I shut down my PC, hoping that Debian would find and correct the error during shutdown or during the subsequent bootup.
After it shut down, I waited several seconds and then powered it back on. That time, there were no error messages. Just to be sure, I powered it down and booted it back up several times. No error messages. Yay for Debian!
The very large fan on the bottom of the power supply draws air from inside the case and forces through the power supply and out a grille on its back. That fan is so quiet that at one point, I opened my PC’s case while it was running, just to peek in with a flashlight make sure that it was spinning. It was.
To “burn-in” the new power supply, I left my PC on for the past 16.5 hours. So far, there haven’t been any problems, and so far, everything is working great.
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Consumer Info, Debian, DIY, Hardware, Linux, Personal, Review, Tech Support