It’s me, live with it

I have another PC besides the one I always uses. This PC here have served its purpose as a media center PC (as in, TV replacement) and working PC for my sister. And today, It showed weird problem.

It keeps turning off itself, and by turning off, I mean it just goes dead, not politely showing any shutdown screen. That, by itself ruled out any virus-related, or even software-related problem. I made that point sure by leaving it idle at the bios screen. It goes dead.

Knowing that it’s a hardware problem, I opened the lid of the PC, and found that the case fan isn’t connected. I then connected it, close the lid, and turned it on, idling at the bios screen. It died, again.

I grabbed my spare Power supply unit (You always need one) from the cupboard, and replaced the one on the PC. Plugged everything, close the lid, leaving it idling at the bios screen. It still dies.

Now, the PC is placed under the desk in the corner of the room, where it is kinda hard to do any work on the PC. So I carried it to my desk to see what’s wrong. And in a minute, I figured it out. The CPU fan is dead.

I feel stupid for not realising it earlier, I closed the lid everytime I changed something before, so I didn’t see it. And the fan was never a noisy one to begin with, so I can’t tell by listening.

Anyway, the solution for this problem is simple enough, I grabbed another CPU fan sitting around and installed it. Problem solved.

This is not a hard problem. I just took the wrong step by closing the lid of the PC before making sure everything is in order. Keep your head cool and double-check everything if you find such problem. I just forget those words. Silly me.

So, my house has electricity problem for about half a year now. No, I’m not kidding.

The circuit breaker keeps turning off, though none of the fuse popped out. Which is pretty much normal, seeing as the fuses are rated 6A or more. This causes the central breaker to overload before any of the fuses.

You might think that it is a small problem. To show you how bad this situation is for me, try imagining a one-minute power outage. Done? Now imagine it happens six times daily. Good, now you understand.

Well, to be honest, I have a clear idea of what’s actually happening, and so do my electrical-engineer uncle. An air conditioner unit is broken. When we checked the power consumption, it reads 5A all by itself. Which means it is drawing 1100 Watt of electricity. We told this to the owner, with no further action. We eventually grew tired and decided to wait until the air conditioner unit is either totally broken or catches fire. Hopefully not the latter.

That might be too light a reason to stop the pressure. That is true, but when they say that my computer is drawing huge power, I just stopped caring.

Now, these outages is effecting me very badly, as I work with my computer a lot. And as you already know, power outages and computer using is really not the best combination.

I actually bought a UPS and used it for a while.

One day, when the power goes off, I realized that I didn’t hear my UPS beeping. so I ran upstairs to find it dead while trying to protect my PC. Okay, only the battery is dead. Now that heroic UPS is stored in a cupboard, waiting for me to get a new battery for it.

You see now, the outages are bad and often enough to kill a UPS. Imagine what will happen to my PC in the long run.

I really must buy some low-amperage fuses soon enough.

I have a little… affection… to spiritual/supranatural things, just like pretty much everyone else. And thankfully, the internet is a very valuable source of them.

If you know what to find and where.

Because, you know, not everything the net is reliable, some of them are valid, of course, but the others are, well, misleading.

For example, if you search ‘ghost pictures’ in google, you should find some sites that are pretty much heading towards the right direction. You probably will also stumble on one of my favourite blog.

And, of course, among those search results, you will find one (NSFW) that is downright stupid.

That site is so ridiculous that I stopped reading after looking at half of the front page.

Photoshopped pictures? it seems like they’re not even taking it seriously.

Look, I know that a lot of ghost pictures available on the net is fake or photoshopped, but the ones you see at that site looks fake at first glimpse, and even more later.

I don’t think anyone older than 10-years-old would fall for it. But then again, that site is not suitable for those under the age of 18.

So, yeah, downright stupidity.

EDIT: I only realize that ghost-pictures.org is a joke site, after actually reading it. Sorry for this mistake.

http://www.hoax-slayer.com/fake-eggs-china.shtml

http://paultan.org/archives/2006/01/01/china/ 

Hoaxindo (indonesian) 

Anyone can clarify this?

Because I don’t think it is a total hoax, I can see some rationality in it.

Chemical ingridients can be bought cheap in bulk. And I won’t be surprised if the cost of making fake eggs is less than the price of real eggs. 

This afternoon, I went to my local computer store to pick my harddrive. I’m happy. The moment I reached home, I installed the drive in my PC. And whaddya know, It didn’t work.

Now, having just returned from the store, the possibility of the harddrive to be broken is very small, so I started to be suspicious with the power supply. I unplugged the power to my DVD-RW drive and my the other two harddrives installed in my PC. So the only thing left now are the problematic drive and some case fans. And when this didn’t solve the problem, I started to be worried.

I tried to calm myself, and browse around the net about this. Not finding anything useful, I tried shotgunning it. I unplugged everything, and turned on the PC with only motherboard, processor, ram, and the graphics card. It worked. I plugged the problematic drive. Worked. Plugging the other two harddrives didn’t change the condition, and so did adding the DVD-RW drive. But when I plugged the case fans, the problem returns.

The culprits are those fans.

The three fans are ordinary LED case fans. each of them has red, green, yellow, and blue LEDs on. I didn’t think this should be enough to tax the PSU. I was confused.

But then I remembered that my PSU has two 12v rails. one of them, connected to the DVD-RW and a harddrive, is rated at 13A, while the other, connected to two harddrives and three fans, is rated at 10A. Which roughly translated as 120 Watts

Now, at worst case scenario, a harddrive should only consume 25 watts. Two of them means roughly 50 watts. A fan with four LEDs won’t reach 5 watts, but we’ll use that to make things simple. The total power consumed shouldn’t reach more than 65 watts.

Then why didn’t My PSU cope? The answer is because every PSU, especially cheap and dodgy PSUs, can’t deliver their maximum rated capacity on one rail, especially if the other rails were demanding quite an amount of power. So, 13A on one rail and 10A on the other won’t add to as 23A on both, more like 14A, tops.

This is one of the problem that made people confused like hell. I actually considered buying a new PSU this afternoon before realising the two rails thing.

So, moral of the story is: Take your PSU’s rated wattage with a large grain of salt and overbuy it. I’m serious.