[Dean]

Damn, it has been a bad month or so with PCs and related parts for me. But I think I have found the major culprit and wanted to warn the rest of you.

I finally spent some time to try and figure out what happened to my office workstation. (I have many others, so it was a pain, but not a big enough one.)

It was an eMachines T2040 2Ghz Celeron machine.

Well, after some testing and research I found that eMachines and some other PC manufacturers have had problems with underpowered power supplies taking themselves, motherboards and then KVMs/keyboards out in the process.

Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, my exact problem.

Piece of crap had only a 250 Watt Bestec Power supply!!!!

And I had 2 HD, 2 optical drives, 2Ghz CPU and 1Gb of Ram in it!!! (Yes, my fault for not checking it when I put in upgrades)

So, why should you care?

Well apparently eMachines is not the only ones who have done this. So, before you lose a bunch of hardware, time and possibly data, I suggest you or somebody you know who isn't afraid of the inside of a PC open up your case and pull the PS enough to check brand and wattage.

350 Watts is the bare minimum IMHO for a 2Ghz or less machine with one HD and 1 optical drive.

More CPU, HDs or good graphics card, etc. don't even think about less than 500 Watts.

It is my own damn fault, and there were symptoms before it blew I should have caught, but didn't. Just don't want it to happen to you...

Anybody need a micro PC case, or have a spare Socket 478 MB lying around?