Thursday, March 20, 2008

I (Still Don't) Have The Power, I Think

Swapping out the data cable on the older SATA hard drive was a definite improvement but, like I said, the system is still locking up after a while. I'm back to a power problem and here's why I think that.

I was wondering if it was something with the way the drive was formatted so I connected it last night with the intention of formatting it from within Vista (there's nothing on the drive right now). I couldn't get it to boot reliably. In my warped mind, I thought the drive was "sticky" because I used to leave it on 24/7 and thought that it had gotten a chance to cool. In an effort to "warm it up", I connected the power but not the data cable, turned on the machine, entered my password and went to bed. When I got up this morning, the machine was locked and hadn't completely initialized (the sidebar wasn't loaded yet). When I disconnected the second drive, everything came up fine.

Right now I'm running 3 fans (incl. processor), 2 DVD/RW drives, a floppy, at least one hard drive, a Radeon 9600 video card, a SB Live! audio card and whatever is built onto the MoBo on a 400 or 450 Watt power supply. It *should* be enough but I guess I'm in the market for an inexpensive 600W PS.

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