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Client's PC shut down every 20 minutes for a week, turned out to be a $4 part
Had a small office job here in Boise where a receptionist's desktop kept rebooting on its own, no blue screen, nothing in the event log. I swapped the power supply, reseated the RAM, ran memory tests for two days, and finally threw a $12 power strip on it as a test. Dead cable was arcing just enough to brown out the board, and the strip fixed it on the spot. I felt pretty dumb standing there holding a power supply I didn't need to buy. Anyone else get burned by a cheap cable pretending to be a hardware failure?
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iris_ellis21d ago
A $12 power strip on it as a test" is a funny way to end a week of pain. But was it really the strip that fixed it, or just fresh contact in the outlet the first time you plugged it in? A loose fit in a worn receptacle can do the same thing, and you would have "fixed" it with anything you plugged in hard. I am not saying the cable was fine, just that you swapped two things at once, the cable and the outlet connection, so you cannot pin it on one. A $4 part story sounds good until you realize you never actually proved which $4 part it was. Do you still have that cable, and did you meter it or wiggle test it to see the arc? If not, this might just be coincidence wearing a nice story.
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