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Power supply or SSD going out ??


mark skinner

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I went into my studio yesterday and this morning and my my Lenovo SSD Tower was powered up with a warning on the screen about not starting correctly. It went thru a self diagnosis and eventually loaded up and then shut itself down after about 5 min. I always power everything down when I'm finished working. Now it wont power up. It tries about 4 times off/on before it stops. One odd thing is that it tries to start by just plugging in the power chord without pressing the power button. This is my main studio pc and is only about 2.5 yrs. old.  No real problems up until now.  Any basic ideas ?  I've got "most" of my projects backed up so , I'm not "crying" yet    Thanks  mark

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I do some computer support.

My first thought is power supply.  But could be something else overloading the power supply.  Sadly, the only real way to test the power supply is to use a known good power supply.  I'm not familiar with Lenovo's and don't know if it uses (or can use) a standard ATX power supply or some custom power supply.  

 

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Thanks Jack, I blew the case out , cleaned connectors and re seated the ram cards. It booted right up and stayed on about 20 min. before shutting down. I'm going back in and see what power supply it has.   Nothing appears to be getting hot and it's giving me a "shutting down" screen instead of just dying.    I'll keep looking.     ms 

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Here's a good one.  It stayed on for 2 hours this morning and I managed to record a little. Leaving my music room I saw the display on a battery charger flashing wildly. (This and a fish pond is on the same circuit) The circulation pump in my pond was plugged up but not kicking anything out. I fixed it , battery charger back to normal , pc fired up. I'm not ruling out the power supply yet . Might be an incoming voltage problem.       ms

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I do not run my desktop (DAW) PC on "raw" AC power.  I use a UPS which along with the battery backup, provides some line isolation, filtering, surge etc.   Even my laptop that I use for on site recordings, I use a Furman surge and line filtering power strip.

AC power line and what is connected to the same AC power phase can induce interference and depending on the power (amp) rating can cause sags and other problems.  Maybe even your problem.   

I would try to find an outlet, for the PC,  that is not on the same line/power phase as the pump.  At a minimum, if you can't afford a UPS, get a good quality surge protector and use that.  

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5 minutes ago, Jack Stoner said:

To add, although the AC power may potentially be the main source of this problem,  it still does not rule out a "weak" power supply.

 

+1 to this..  I had a brown out a few years ago, where the AC went down from 240V to 50V.  Three SSD's were destroyed by that.

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 It's a pretty consistent problem now after a couple of hours. Ordering a power supply And a proper UPS. There sure are a lot of choices to sift thru.  Thanks for the feedback. I'll give an update when I get the problem resolved.  I'm back to XP and Sonar for a little while ..      mark

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 I needed my battery charger today, and it is definitely "Fried" and probably the culprit for my incoming voltage problem. New power supply is installed. Lesson learned.  I managed to find a power supply  (and only one) on E-bay instead of waiting on a slow boat. No power conditioner yet..  The first thing I noticed after installing was the increase in fan cooling. I think the CPU fan was overriding it . The old one was pulling air into the case , this one is blasting it out. I Really appreciate your help.   I'll do a long test in the morning.    Thanks ..   mark

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  • 2 weeks later...

Back to the same problem , even after moving everything to a spare bedroom for a while.  PC is going to the doctor Monday. Turns out it's 5 yrs. old instead of the 2.5 I said earlier. Time sure flies. It looked pretty dry between the heat sink and CPU , couldn't find any paste today. I'll pass that along to the Doc.     I'm growing weary ..  ms

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 Picked up my pc yesterday. He said they almost gave up thinking it was a motherboard problem , then found an intermittent short in the power switch.  I'm back in business.  The only thing I lost was my CbB activation. I had changed my cmos battery while troubleshooting ,  my 6 month refresh was surpassed by several years until I realized I hadn't reset my date and time.    Thanks ..  good for now.      mark

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Its rare to have the switch or wiring go bad.  As someone that still does some PC repair (I'm retired) the switch, in a case such as yours, would be the last thing suspected.

I've been doing user support on the Dell forums for 20 years and don't recall one bad power switch.

 

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@Jack Stoner  I guess I'm the exception. I also have and old HP with the same problem.  I can actually see it arc from a bundle of wires with the switch hanging out of the case.   But ..  in fact the switch was the very "Last" thing the tech looked at. They fed power directly (bypassing the switch) and it booted right up and stayed on. Thanks for the comments and the help.   mark

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