The power cord-seriously?

[DebAmstutz]

I thought technology was supposed to make life easier - seems like it's had the opposite effect!   

[Jeff Zylstra]

I thought technology was supposed to make life easier - seems like it's had the opposite effect!   

Yes, some of the requirements of the new "green" energy efficient refrigerators makes it so they don't last nearly as long, and also makes them more expensive to repair.   I hate things that have planned obsolescence built into them. 

[Billy Welsh]

I thought technology was supposed to make life easier - seems like it's had the opposite effect!   

Yes, some of the requirements of the new "green" energy efficient refrigerators makes it so they don't last nearly as long, and also makes them more expensive to repair.   I hate things that have planned obsolescence built into them.

Not to mention STUPID design decisions.  A fuse to protect your expensive fridge from surges?  Great idea.  Making it next to impossible to change?  What's the point of it then???

[Mark]

Not to mention STUPID design decisions.  A fuse to protect your expensive fridge from surges?  Great idea.  Making it next to impossible to change?  What's the point of it then???

A fuse?  Why not a breaker??  Think it would make too much sense.

[DebAmstutz]

I have a cousin who has been an auto/truck mechanic for years and he says if the people who design car/truck engines had to work on them, they'd be a lot less complicated and the parts that wear out the fastest or the ones with potential to be problematic would be easiest to get to under the hood.

[Jeff Zylstra]

I have a cousin who has been an auto/truck mechanic for years and he says if the people who design car/truck engines had to work on them, they'd be a lot less complicated and the parts that wear out the fastest or the ones with potential to be problematic would be easiest to get to under the hood.

Having been a mechanic, I can agree with that.  Unfortunately, the people who design things often have an accounting background, or motivation to their designs.  I always enjoyed it when you had to lift the engine up in a car to change a spark plug or change a serpentine belt.  That comes because the bodies are dropped onto the chasis after the engine and all its components are already in place.  I'm sure they've been cussed out by the mechanics at their dealership many times, but it's probably cheaper do it this way and money talks.

[Joshua Conner]

I have never had a power cord go bad in fact I rarely change the cord when users get a new pc.  Maybe cords arent made like the used to be so since I am using cords from the early 90's they are better 

[Mark]

I have never had a power cord go bad in fact I rarely change the cord when users get a new pc.  Maybe cords arent made like the used to be so since I am using cords from the early 90's they are better 

I don't think it's very common and it is probably more common if/when part of the cord is stressed.  i.e. pulled in and out a lot, or squished against a wall.

I'll admit I was astonished the first time I realized a power cord was actually bad.  Like, extension cords and lamp cords, etc have been around forever... why/how/wtf do computer power cords go bad.  What gives? lol

Edit: Actually, I bet what goes "bad" is the female end and the connectors aren't making full contact.  Who knows.  Only seen it a couple times.  Now, Ethernet cable -- that's a different story.

[Jeff Golas]

So Jeff G., what do you recommend?  I've had 2 cheap LCD tv's from Sam's get fried power supplies from surges.  I'm getting what I paid for with the cheap parts installed, but it's a hassle I'd like to avoid in the future.

Get a more expensive surge suppressor...preferably some decent brand like APC but something that you know has more than 2 parts in it. Prob gonna cost at least $40+ for something decent, if you're plugging good stuff in. I use a cheapo on my TV at home but I also turn it off whenever a storm rolls through now.

Here's examples of those cheapo surge suppressors and how the varistors fail: http://www.djsociety.org/Surge_1.htm

(Note the 6th picture down on the right - despite the varistors being cut comment, notice how many more parts THAT unit has over the others? Thats an APC surge suppressor that I know as prob around $40.) I've seen one first hand that was ballooned out from the varistors popping like popcorn, but whatever was plugged into that strip were the only appliances in the house to survive. A car hit a pole and shorted the phases...220 into 110 outlets :-)

PS - most electronics have varistors built into them as well.

[DebAmstutz]

After the power cord incident, now we have another problem that is supposed to be looked at by the IT guy tonight.  Several times over the last few weeks, the server has had a message on it in the morning regarding using a boot disk.  It was in the process of restarting when this message came up.  I'm sorry I don't have the exact verbage.  I had copied it off the screen on Friday and after calling the IT guy, reading him the message, following his directions and plugging the server into a different wall socket, it started up okay and I threw the note away.  The same message was on the server this morning and I tried various power sockets, left the server turned off for 5 minutes, left it turned off for 10 minutes, and it would always get that boot disk message when I turned it back on.  The IT guy came over with a new power supply and THAT didn't work either.  Somehow, he did get the server started up, but is coming back again after 5:00pm to see if this boot disk nonsense can be remedied.  Has anyone ever encountered this problem?  If so, how did you fix it?  I could leave a note with suggestions for him.

[Mark]

How old is the server?  Without seeing exact error messages, it sounds like it could be anything from a simple misconfiguration (less likely since it worked before) to hard disks going bad (possibly more likely).  Not sure exactly why the power supply is involved, but it's probably that your IT guy already knows something about the cause.

[Jeff Zylstra]

It wouldn't hurt to run a chkdsk on the drive(s).  Also, he may want to replace the BIOS battery, re-seat the RAM and give it a good cleaning while he's got the case off.  My bet is that one of the drivers is going bad, however. 

Now is a good time to make sure that you have working backups, and that you have a boot disk and/or "emergency disk" to boot from in case you need it.

[DebAmstutz]

The server is from March of 2013 so it's fairly new.  Would disks or drivers go bad this soon? 

[Jeff Zylstra]

The server is from March of 2013 so it's fairly new.  Would disks or drivers go bad this soon?

Hard drives can go "boom" at any time, regardless of age.  Have you looked at the Windows event viewer logs yet?  There may be something leading up to this error that may be helpful.

[DebAmstutz]

I don't think I'm supposed to be looking at the event logs, so I will leave those alone.  I have been shown very few things in regard to the server.  It's too bad.  If I have good directions, I can follow them and get things done, or at least try to determine what's going wrong.  My workstation has never had the problems that other peoples' have had.  The "box" for it still has a CD-ROM drive AND a floppy drive.  All that I know has been done is to add RAM.  There's nothing much on it except what's needed for my job, so nothing much else affects it, and it runs pretty well.  I did download FireFox in order to be able to access the online bank account because PNC upgraded their website and it didn't like IE8 anymore.  Most of us are also still on XP, but that is going to have to change one of these days.