Episode: 2590
Title: HPR2590: Blowing a PC Power Supply
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2590/hpr2590.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 06:15:40

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This in HP are episode 2,590 entitled, blowing a PC power supply, and in part of the series, hardware upgrades.
It is hosted by Tony Humeca Tony H1,212, and in about 4 minutes long, and carrying a clean flag.
The summary is just a short show on how I managed to blow the power supply on my desktop PC.
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Greetings, how can public radio listeners? This is Tony Humeca again, coming all the way from Blackpool,
to the UK. Originally this show was going to be about some new kit that I recently bought at my favourite computer auction.
However, as luck or bad luck should have it, I fried the power supply on my desktop machine yesterday,
as I was setting it up again after moving back to my office.
The PC is an HP Compact Elite 8300 macro desktop tower with an i7 third generation,
3770 3.4 gig CPU, and since I've upgraded it, now I've 16 gig RAM at a primary 256 gig SSD.
It's my daily driver and I've been running it for a couple of years now since I bought it at the set auction.
It's the best PC I've ever owned. Full specifications will be in the show now.
As I said, I was resetting up my full rig after moving it back to the office upstairs after a temporary move,
while I had a house guest. As I was plugging in the power cable, there was a flash in the crack,
and a few expletives from me were uttered, and sure enough, when I switched off the power at the plug and reconnected the power cable,
and tried to power on the PC, it was dead. I was hoping it was a power supply that had blown.
And as I had a spare, I was not particularly concerned. However, only investigation HP have done the dirty with the design of the motherboard and power supply,
and neither a standard ATX configuration. Priority hardware strikes for this baby.
I was lucky as a few months ago at the auction. This picked up an I3HP using the same case, so I pulled out the power supply from this and fitted it to the I7.
Luckily, it did turn out to be the issue, and the PC sprang into life when I had the power button.
So I'm now left with a PC that works, but another one that's useless, unless I can find a power supply to match it.
In the next match, it's next to useless except for spares, which is probably what it'll turn out to be.
So the lessons learned, never connect the power cable when the socket is live.
If your plug socket doesn't have a switch to isolate it, connect the kettle end of the PC to the PC first to reduce the risk of a short, like what happened to me.
Also, never assume that second-hand PCs are standard, with the case or motherboard format, as you may have the problem sourcing spares, if anything goes wrong, does in my case.
Not the first PC disaster I've had over the years, and I can.
As in this case, usually get random, but although not when I break the BIOS on a load over X201 time, trying to clear a BIOS plusword, again, I was left with a box of spares, which actually gave me very ugly.
So that's it for this episode, and it's Tale of WoW.
I'll actually do another episode on the recent trip to the auction, and mind you laptop shortly.
So this is Tony Hughes, signing off for HECK Public Radio.
For now, bye!
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