It’s been 3 or 4 days now since i last had a blue screen of death. It looks like it was all down to that one stick of dodgy RAM i got but today i got & installed a new power supply unit, just to make sure my PC wasn’t being fed ‘dirty’ power by an old, possibly underpowered PSU…
Out with the old
My old PSU was a 375w Dell brand. It powered all the original components but over the last year or so i’ve added an extra hard drive, a more powerful graphics card and some more RAM too. It should have been able to handle all of that, and right up until this morning it did appear to handle all of that but unfortunately it became victim to my paranoia.
The PSU is a pretty boring part of a computer. Getting a bigger, better PSU doesn’t improve performance whatsoever so it tends to be bottom on the list of ‘upgrades’. That said, a dying PSU or a PSU under-powering a system can and will cause trouble. Trouble in the form of random blue screens or worse case scenario, a fried motherboard / components.
Needless to say i don’t want to be the guy who is equipped with all of this knowledge and then does nothing about it after having seen some potential symptoms. It’d be a like a doctor that suspects someone has a bad heart but waits until they have a heart attack before doing anything about it.
In with the new
I ordered this OCZ 600W ModXStream Pro Power Supply last week and it arrived this morning.
It’s slightly smaller than my old PSU but still fits snuggly in the case however because the new cables are so rigid, the case is in fact a little bit messier but i can live with that… the only time i open up the case is if something’s broke. Hopefully that won’t be any time soon 🙂
Upgrade complete
I’ve returned a 2gb stick of faulty RAM but once i get a replacement for that, i’ll have upgraded RAM, PSU & Graphics Card which will be enough to keep my desktop PC in good shape for another year at least. Because i’ve a dual monitor set up with my PC and prefer it to my Mac mini, whenever it’s out of action i always feel helpless or that i’m running on empty. It’s very rare i have any kind of problem be it with hardware or software but it’s comforting knowing that i can pinpoint problems & fix them without getting to the stage where i want to throw everything out the window. I’m looking forward to making up for the past couple of weeks of relative inactivity online & particularly with offline photoshop stuff.