Bill,

On Mon, 5 Mar 2007 19:34:06 -0800, William "Chops" Westfield wrote:

> 
> On Mar 5, 2007, at 5:28 PM, Howard Winter wrote:
> 
> >> I submit that the intersection of people who need to change their
> >> power supplies, and the people who can't deal with the non-standard
> >> connector really OUGHT to be pretty close to zero.
> >
> > I don't think so!  I know dozens of people who would fit this,
> > including myself.
> 
> But how often do you (need to) change power supplies in a computer?

On average, about once every other month!  This includes my own machines and those of friends, family and clients.  Not long ago my 
next-door-neighbour had a strange set of faults showing up which I traced to the +12V line being about +10.3V - replacing the PSU fixed it.  I think he 
may have been overloading the old one for some time, as he had a lot of hardware in the box.  My girlfriend had a good quality Zalman PSU literally 
go bang!  She was still shaking when she called me to tell me about it - Zalman sent a replacement without question - also without feeding back 
what the problem had been, but at least it didn't do any damage when it failed.  I build and re-build machines for myself and others quite a lot, so 
swapping PSUs around happens fairly often, especially when I need to add a lot of drives to a previously un-loaded machine.  I treat PSUs as a 
commodity, just use the one that's powerful enough for the job.  I'd never entertain re-pinning the motherboard connector to fit a hybrid (the polite 
word!) machine - I just avoid machines that need it.
 
> I mean, I've owned about a dozen bought computers by now, and the
> only supply I've changed was the noisy one in the Mac when Apple
> offered a free "fix."  Note that "deal with the non-standard
> connector" includes being careful enough to buy a Dell-specific
> supply or adaptor; it need not mean building your own custom
> connector.

I've never bought a factory-built machine other than laptops - I always build my own either from scratch or from a 2nd-hand base of varying 
completeness (most recently a really nice Antec case & PSU with everything in it except a hard drive - paid less than the case would have cost 
empty!  :-)  My next PC job is to dismantle one of my ThinkPad T23s and resolder the inductor that's come loose (known problem, symptom is that the 
fan "hunts" when you turn the power on, and it doesn't even attempt to start the POST).  Ah well!  :-)

Different people have different ways of going about things, so have different experiences.

Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


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