Solve : Failing Power Supply??

1.	Solve : Failing Power Supply??
Answer» Getting a noticeable hum from my old rig - HP a1600n who had her 10th birthday on Oct 10. I suspect it is the PS begging for mercy. I make a fresh back-up image every week so I am not worried about catastrophic failure. I have done a few repairs (new HD, optical drive and graphics card when on-board graphics went bye-bye) over the years even though some of you advised against spending money on such an old rig. A couple questions: Is there any reason to replace PS before it fails, eg prevent collateral damage or a fire hazard? What is the best source for an aftermarket PS? Thanks.Are you sure its the power supply and not a off balance cooling fan? Power supplies when they are begging for mercy usually make ticking sounds vs a hum. I have an old eMachine that is about the same age as your computer and it hums because the CPU heatsink fan is dying. Motherboard has shut off temp threshold set up to shut the system down is it gets too hot as well as if the FAN tach is not reported it will shut down as well to protect itself. Backup Images can be bad sometimes.... reason being if your power supply fries the main board, you would need to find another same exact motherboard or computer of similar model with same exact motherboard to restore the image too. People can have their data held hostage by the inability to get their data off the image. I have been involved in helping people get their data back after say an old AMD Computer running XP died. They had an image with all their data on that image. The image utility they were using did not have a image viewer/data extractor utility like Ghost Explorer etc. I was paid really well to take their image, force it to different hardware, and then perform a Windows XP Repair installation to force their image to take to drastically different hardware, went from a AMD Duron CPU system to a Intel Pentium 4. Once I did this I was ABLE to have direct access to their data and burn the data to DVD-R's. The client was VERY HAPPY to get their data back. And it even progressed from there as to them needing more than that. They had software installed to this AMD Duron system that was VERY COSTLY, the system was highly configured and very important. They really needed their computer back the original computer alive again, I ended up selling them the Pentium 4 computer migrated from the AMD to the INTEL, and then later selling them on the idea of virtualization. Ported an image over to Virtual PC 2007. They liked having the old system as a virtual system with Virtual PC 2007, able to run the new laptop, and bring up the old important system for running the software that cost thousands of dollars. Last i knew they were still using this virtual system. Told them that as long as they dont run both systems at the same time they can run it this way but they cant run the virtual copy of the physical system at the same time. So while images are good, they are not fail-proof. Data that is important should be stored to cloud storage or external media where its easily accessible by yourself. This way the data is not held hostage to an image file and matching hardware, or having to find a image file explorer like tool if one exists to extract data. Images are great for quick restore of a system that is corrupt or copying to same exact hardware when prior system is completely dead to be back up and running, but data itself should be backed up in ADDITION to the image, so the image is really just a means of getting OS and software back on computer and the normal non-image backup is to have immediate access to data if you need to use a totally different computer. Your lucky the motherboard still works with integrated GPU dead. Friend of mine with nvidia nForce 430 GeForce 6150SE cooked his integrated video playing World of Warcraft for about 8 hours straight on day off. It killed the board as for the chipset is the heart of the motherboard. Ended up having to install a new motherboard and real video card with a cooling fan on it. He also took the time to upgrade from Athlon II x4 620 2.6Ghz to a Phenom II x6 2.8Ghz. Told him the CPU he has was plenty, but he wanted the Phenom II x6 ( 6-core ) CPU. I got his Athlon II x4 620 quadcore for free when offering to buy it from him for $50 6 years ago. Still running this CPU, but its showing its age especially when the 8-core 4Ghz I have is so much faster with multithreaded applications/games.I agree with DaveLembke. There is not sure way to predict a PC failure. If you hear a noise if-may be from a fan. If so, just fix the fan. Here is information that is often ignored. The CPU ans chip set have a failure rate above what most of use expect. In fact, the failure rate pf CPU and chip set the is almost on a par with some other things, like HDD failure. But do not expect a warning. If the problem is the CPU, just replace it. But if it is in the chip set, you must get a new motherboard. Dave, I recently replaced my SIL's 12 year old HP PC operating on Win 7 with a new HP loaded with Win 10. I used a Macrium Reflect image of old PC to load all of her data onto the new machine. It never occurred to me that you can not use a Macrium Reflect image to back-up data. Thanks for the heads-up. Quote I used a Macrium Reflect image of old PC to load all of her data onto the new machine. It never occurred to me that you can not use a Macrium Reflect image to back-up data. Thanks for the heads-up. hmmmm slightly sarcastic I see... Macrium has an extraction feature... so it can be used to backup data to just get the data off of the image. I was explaining that not all have this feature, some are only intended for a full rebuild of a hard drive or set of drives and for those you can run into the problem like the client I had to assist where you need matching hardware or to push image to a different system, and then perform repair installation to get it up and running to get all the data. Some data could have been extracted by pushing the image to a hard drive and then accessing that hard drive as an external drive too. But he had databases that required exporting and so a system up and running healthy was a must to get all of his data backed up vs just what was accessible in folders of my documents etc. Imaging of a system also should never stomp on top of the prior image. Doing so if something goes wrong with the system in the process you then have a partial image and a system that doesnt work. Using 2 different folders for the image to be stored can avoid overwriting last good image with newest, and then alternate between folders per image created so that you always have a image to roll back to if something goes wrong. Unless you are adding software to the system all the time, and making browser changes, imaging is overkill on a weekly basis, unless your creating multiples of images so you can revert to an earlier point than just that of the last image. The actual data that needs to be backed up might be very little between the last backup and the current, so it should be pretty quick vs a image created that takes time depending on how much data is to become an image as well as what bottleneck there is in the process of image creation such as USB 2.0 slowing down the process or even worse USB 1.1 on an older system and say 14GB to image. http://www.howtogeek.com/226436/how-to-mount-a-macrium-reflect-backup-image-to-retrieve-files/No Dave, I was not being sarcastic at all. I know almost nothing about computers and sincerely appreciate your depth of knowledge and willingness to share it. I make weekly images because someone on this FORUM (I think Allan) said that was good practice because images can get corrupted. Maybe I misunderstood his point. I think I may have been overwriting images on my external hard drive. Here is what I do - delete old image, rename folder and locate new image in the renamed folder. Also, I always verify the new image. Is this ok or should I completely delete old folder/image and create a new folder? Thanks.Hey sorry about reading it as sarcasm if that wasnt the intent. If your external hard drive capacity allows ( has enough space ) keeping old images in other folders with a folder name showing age of image such as Nov2016Week3, Nov2016Week2, Nov2016Week1 or even just the date that the image was created such as 11262016Image if your MMDDYYYY it might help to have another image to resort back to if say you had malware and the malware wasnt detected immediately, you could then try going backwards week after week until you find where the system is clean of the malware etc. Safest would be to have 2 external hard drives and alternate between them this way you dont overwork one external hard drive and are not writing the new image to the external that contains the previous image file. I like redundancy and options for system recovery vs just one drive and crossing fingers that it fixes the problem. I bought a bunch of 32GB Flash drives for my backup rotation and they are labelled A, B, C and so I back up my data only weekly to a thumb drive and just keep the rotation of ABCABCABC and this way I have 3 backups to get data from that can go back almost a month. Before the oldest gets eased I copy that backup to my 4TB external and so I can go back even further if needed. I started this backup method a few years ago where only projects are backed up regularly, whereas the larger chunk of data ( music, ect rarely changes so no need to keep writing that data week after week when its always the same, so it can just be stored on the external 4TB drive and a copy of it on the C: drive of the computer to play my CD's that I converted to MP3's years ago with iTunes. My most important data is what is backed up regularly. My music I have a copy of it all on an external and it would exceed the 32GB, so the 32GB drives are only backing up projects that I am working on writing C++ or Perl etc. I also have cloud storage but still like having physical control of my data, so I dont use the cloud for anything confidential since the data is not in my control once up on the cloud. If you only have that one external, storing multiple images on it is best vs deleting the prior image, unless your external is too small in storage capacity to allow for multiple images. Took a look-see inside. Hum is definitely NOT coming from PS although PS fan is a little gravelly. I would say most of the hum is coming from the harddrive. Case fan is also humming but not as much as HD. I'll just wait and see what happens.IMO, Having a spare HDD is a good investment. Having more drive space makes for a better backup plan. Macrium Reflect* has nice knowledge base that deals with other ways to backup your data and system. http://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW/Differential+and+incremental+disk+images Quote After you have created an initial full image, you can create differential and incremental images. These are both quicker to execute than full images and create much smaller image files. Note: With the Free Edition of Macrium Reflect you can only make full and differential images of your disks and partitions. Recommended reading for all, even if one does not use their products. I use felt washers on any HDD mounting screws... Small rubber ones will do in a pinch. Quote from: patio on November 27, 2016, 05:56:03 AM I use felt washers on any HDD mounting screws... Small rubber ones will do in a pinch. Thanks Patio, I'll give it a whirl. If it is the mounting screws, wonder why it is getting worse? Maybe I just never noticed before but I definitely believe it is much worse than it used to be.Older drives tend to vibrate more...causing the case resonance... An EASY test for this is unplug just the power cord to the drive and power up...is the noise gone ? ?Hard drives are generally never off balance and so a hard drive making noise like that I wouldnt trust storing anything important on it. The case can resonate bearing noise and amplify the sound though. Ive seen before DVD and CD ROMs with discs LEFT in them spinning up and off balance making a buzz like hum as the case amplifies the sound of the drive. Do you happen to have a disc in the optical drive that is spinning fast even though not being read by the system? You can also test this by disconnecting the power jack to the optical drive in case it has some strange issue of trying to spin with no disc in it which might be close to the hard drive and causing the noise. Hard drives that have bearing failure usually sound like a grinding sound or a whine sound to it. I had a drive one time that sounded like a rock crusher but it didnt function other than make the noise. It was in a laptop and the drive had glass platters and one of them was chipped and the fragment whipping around inside the small 2.5" drive.I've gotten case resonance from brand new installed HDD's.... Thats why i always use the washers. Quote from: patio on November 27, 2016, 09:06:40 AM Older drives tend to vibrate more...causing the case resonance... An easy test for this is unplug just the power cord to the drive and power up...is the noise gone ? ? Yep, that is what I did for HD and case fan to confirm.

Answer»

Getting a noticeable hum from my old rig - HP a1600n who had her 10th birthday on Oct 10. I suspect it is the PS begging for mercy. I make a fresh back-up image every week so I am not worried about catastrophic failure. I have done a few repairs (new HD, optical drive and graphics card when on-board graphics went bye-bye) over the years even though some of you advised against spending money on such an old rig. A couple questions: Is there any reason to replace PS before it fails, eg prevent collateral damage or a fire hazard? What is the best source for an aftermarket PS? Thanks.Are you sure its the power supply and not a off balance cooling fan? Power supplies when they are begging for mercy usually make ticking sounds vs a hum. I have an old eMachine that is about the same age as your computer and it hums because the CPU heatsink fan is dying. Motherboard has shut off temp threshold set up to shut the system down is it gets too hot as well as if the FAN tach is not reported it will shut down as well to protect itself.

Backup Images can be bad sometimes.... reason being if your power supply fries the main board, you would need to find another same exact motherboard or computer of similar model with same exact motherboard to restore the image too. People can have their data held hostage by the inability to get their data off the image. I have been involved in helping people get their data back after say an old AMD Computer running XP died. They had an image with all their data on that image. The image utility they were using did not have a image viewer/data extractor utility like Ghost Explorer etc. I was paid really well to take their image, force it to different hardware, and then perform a Windows XP Repair installation to force their image to take to drastically different hardware, went from a AMD Duron CPU system to a Intel Pentium 4. Once I did this I was ABLE to have direct access to their data and burn the data to DVD-R's. The client was VERY HAPPY to get their data back. And it even progressed from there as to them needing more than that. They had software installed to this AMD Duron system that was VERY COSTLY, the system was highly configured and very important. They really needed their computer back the original computer alive again, I ended up selling them the Pentium 4 computer migrated from the AMD to the INTEL, and then later selling them on the idea of virtualization. Ported an image over to Virtual PC 2007. They liked having the old system as a virtual system with Virtual PC 2007, able to run the new laptop, and bring up the old important system for running the software that cost thousands of dollars. Last i knew they were still using this virtual system. Told them that as long as they dont run both systems at the same time they can run it this way but they cant run the virtual copy of the physical system at the same time.

So while images are good, they are not fail-proof. Data that is important should be stored to cloud storage or external media where its easily accessible by yourself. This way the data is not held hostage to an image file and matching hardware, or having to find a image file explorer like tool if one exists to extract data. Images are great for quick restore of a system that is corrupt or copying to same exact hardware when prior system is completely dead to be back up and running, but data itself should be backed up in ADDITION to the image, so the image is really just a means of getting OS and software back on computer and the normal non-image backup is to have immediate access to data if you need to use a totally different computer.

*Your lucky the motherboard still works with integrated GPU dead. Friend of mine with nvidia nForce 430 GeForce 6150SE cooked his integrated video playing World of Warcraft for about 8 hours straight on day off. It killed the board as for the chipset is the heart of the motherboard. Ended up having to install a new motherboard and real video card with a cooling fan on it. He also took the time to upgrade from Athlon II x4 620 2.6Ghz to a Phenom II x6 2.8Ghz. Told him the CPU he has was plenty, but he wanted the Phenom II x6 ( 6-core ) CPU. I got his Athlon II x4 620 quadcore for free when offering to buy it from him for $50 6 years ago. Still running this CPU, but its showing its age especially when the 8-core 4Ghz I have is so much faster with multithreaded applications/games.I agree with DaveLembke.

There is not sure way to predict a PC failure. If you hear a noise if-may be from a fan. If so, just fix the fan.

Here is information that is often ignored. The CPU ans chip set have a failure rate above what most of use expect. In fact, the failure rate pf CPU and chip set the is almost on a par with some other things, like HDD failure. But do not expect a warning.

If the problem is the CPU, just replace it. But if it is in the chip set, you must get a new motherboard.
Dave, I recently replaced my SIL's 12 year old HP PC operating on Win 7 with a new HP loaded with Win 10. I used a Macrium Reflect image of old PC to load all of her data onto the new machine. It never occurred to me that you can not use a Macrium Reflect image to back-up data. Thanks for the heads-up. Quote

I used a Macrium Reflect image of old PC to load all of her data onto the new machine. It never occurred to me that you can not use a Macrium Reflect image to back-up data. Thanks for the heads-up.

hmmmm slightly sarcastic I see...

Macrium has an extraction feature... so it can be used to backup data to just get the data off of the image. I was explaining that not all have this feature, some are only intended for a full rebuild of a hard drive or set of drives and for those you can run into the problem like the client I had to assist where you need matching hardware or to push image to a different system, and then perform repair installation to get it up and running to get all the data. Some data could have been extracted by pushing the image to a hard drive and then accessing that hard drive as an external drive too. But he had databases that required exporting and so a system up and running healthy was a must to get all of his data backed up vs just what was accessible in folders of my documents etc.

Imaging of a system also should never stomp on top of the prior image. Doing so if something goes wrong with the system in the process you then have a partial image and a system that doesnt work. Using 2 different folders for the image to be stored can avoid overwriting last good image with newest, and then alternate between folders per image created so that you always have a image to roll back to if something goes wrong.

Unless you are adding software to the system all the time, and making browser changes, imaging is overkill on a weekly basis, unless your creating multiples of images so you can revert to an earlier point than just that of the last image. The actual data that needs to be backed up might be very little between the last backup and the current, so it should be pretty quick vs a image created that takes time depending on how much data is to become an image as well as what bottleneck there is in the process of image creation such as USB 2.0 slowing down the process or even worse USB 1.1 on an older system and say 14GB to image.

http://www.howtogeek.com/226436/how-to-mount-a-macrium-reflect-backup-image-to-retrieve-files/No Dave, I was not being sarcastic at all. I know almost nothing about computers and sincerely appreciate your depth of knowledge and willingness to share it. I make weekly images because someone on this FORUM (I think Allan) said that was good practice because images can get corrupted. Maybe I misunderstood his point. I think I may have been overwriting images on my external hard drive. Here is what I do - delete old image, rename folder and locate new image in the renamed folder. Also, I always verify the new image. Is this ok or should I completely delete old folder/image and create a new folder? Thanks.Hey sorry about reading it as sarcasm if that wasnt the intent.

If your external hard drive capacity allows ( has enough space ) keeping old images in other folders with a folder name showing age of image such as Nov2016Week3, Nov2016Week2, Nov2016Week1 or even just the date that the image was created such as 11262016Image if your MMDDYYYY it might help to have another image to resort back to if say you had malware and the malware wasnt detected immediately, you could then try going backwards week after week until you find where the system is clean of the malware etc.

Safest would be to have 2 external hard drives and alternate between them this way you dont overwork one external hard drive and are not writing the new image to the external that contains the previous image file. I like redundancy and options for system recovery vs just one drive and crossing fingers that it fixes the problem.

I bought a bunch of 32GB Flash drives for my backup rotation and they are labelled A, B, C and so I back up my data only weekly to a thumb drive and just keep the rotation of ABCABCABC and this way I have 3 backups to get data from that can go back almost a month. Before the oldest gets eased I copy that backup to my 4TB external and so I can go back even further if needed. I started this backup method a few years ago where only projects are backed up regularly, whereas the larger chunk of data ( music, ect rarely changes so no need to keep writing that data week after week when its always the same, so it can just be stored on the external 4TB drive and a copy of it on the C: drive of the computer to play my CD's that I converted to MP3's years ago with iTunes. My most important data is what is backed up regularly. My music I have a copy of it all on an external and it would exceed the 32GB, so the 32GB drives are only backing up projects that I am working on writing C++ or Perl etc. I also have cloud storage but still like having physical control of my data, so I dont use the cloud for anything confidential since the data is not in my control once up on the cloud.

If you only have that one external, storing multiple images on it is best vs deleting the prior image, unless your external is too small in storage capacity to allow for multiple images. Took a look-see inside. Hum is definitely NOT coming from PS although PS fan is a little gravelly. I would say most of the hum is coming from the harddrive. Case fan is also humming but not as much as HD. I'll just wait and see what happens.IMO, Having a spare HDD is a good investment. Having more drive space makes for a better backup plan.
Macrium Reflect has nice knowledge base that deals with other ways to backup your data and system.
http://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW/Differential+and+incremental+disk+images
Quote

After you have created an initial full image, you can create differential and incremental images. These are both quicker to execute than full images and create much smaller image files.
Note: With the Free Edition of Macrium Reflect you can only make full and differential images of your disks and partitions.

Recommended reading for all, even if one does not use their products.
I use felt washers on any HDD mounting screws...
Small rubber ones will do in a pinch. Quote from: patio on November 27, 2016, 05:56:03 AM

I use felt washers on any HDD mounting screws...
Small rubber ones will do in a pinch.

Thanks Patio, I'll give it a whirl. If it is the mounting screws, wonder why it is getting worse? Maybe I just never noticed before but I definitely believe it is much worse than it used to be.Older drives tend to vibrate more...causing the case resonance...

An EASY test for this is unplug just the power cord to the drive and power up...is the noise gone ? ?Hard drives are generally never off balance and so a hard drive making noise like that I wouldnt trust storing anything important on it. The case can resonate bearing noise and amplify the sound though.

Ive seen before DVD and CD ROMs with discs LEFT in them spinning up and off balance making a buzz like hum as the case amplifies the sound of the drive. Do you happen to have a disc in the optical drive that is spinning fast even though not being read by the system? You can also test this by disconnecting the power jack to the optical drive in case it has some strange issue of trying to spin with no disc in it which might be close to the hard drive and causing the noise.

Hard drives that have bearing failure usually sound like a grinding sound or a whine sound to it. I had a drive one time that sounded like a rock crusher but it didnt function other than make the noise. It was in a laptop and the drive had glass platters and one of them was chipped and the fragment whipping around inside the small 2.5" drive.I've gotten case resonance from brand new installed HDD's....
Thats why i always use the washers. Quote from: patio on November 27, 2016, 09:06:40 AM

Older drives tend to vibrate more...causing the case resonance...

An easy test for this is unplug just the power cord to the drive and power up...is the noise gone ? ?

Yep, that is what I did for HD and case fan to confirm.

Solve : Failing Power Supply??

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