A fear­ful thing hap­pened on Tues­day. Woke up, resume my desk­top from sleep, pre­pared to leave for classes, then noticed the the PC is off again.  It surely was not a power out­age, because then the com­puter would turn on when I pressed the power but­ton again…

This is one of the “oh shit” moment I really do not like to see.  Espe­cially not know­ing that I have to leave in 10 min­utes and can­not fix it until I get back.

As anx­i­ety lin­gered for the entire day as I explored my options.  I have a net­book capa­ble of play­ing Guild Wars and could let me do Plan­e­tary Inter­ac­tion in Eve Online–that’s about all I have been doing lately.  And a Nook Color is by my side, run­ning the best Android mod, which I used to write most of this post for. Last but not least, a Sam­sung Galaxy phone with bet­ter hard­ware than the Nook Color but with less favor­able screen size.

The PSU’s con­nec­tors had trou­ble inter­fac­ing with the grandmoth­er­board before, and if it was indeed the same issue, 15 min­utes is the max­i­mum amount of time I need to fix it.  Surely if the PSU is to die all the impor­tant stuff (CPU, graph­ics card, and hard drive) would pre­serve, right?

After a closer inspec­tion, I con­firmed the issue is not the con­nec­tors: the PSU sparked and emit­ted a famil­iar smell when I fid­dle with it.

That was def­i­nitely what I hoped for but def­i­nitely not the worst thing that could hap­pen.  My “backup” power sup­ply is a 460 watt Cool­Mas­ter, and it appeared that she could not pro­duce enough juice to sat­isfy the thirst of my quad core CPU and GTX460.  Though after down­grad­ing back to my old 9500GT (and unplugged a num­ber of periph­er­als), the damn machine finally booted normally.

A les­son is learned: don’t buy a cheap PSU of an unknown brand and hope it will last.  The replace­ment: A Rosewill Green Series PSU, 530 watt with active PFC for $50.  Given the amount of good rat­ings it has on Newegg, I feel it will out­per­form its pre­de­ces­sor in both longevity and deliv­er­ing enough power to all the USB con­nec­tions, which the dead PSU did not do well on.