My Pentium 4 3.2GHz desktop will be reaching 4 years old in 2 months time. 2 days ago, my power supply unit (PSU) decided to give up on me by automatically cutting off the power to my computer and hence my computer is prone to shutting down anytime.

2 days ago, when I woke up, I was like how come it is so quiet (my computer is noisy due to the PSU also) and then I realize my computer was off. As I am going to school, I did not on it till I came home at night. When I came home at night, I on it, everything seems to be normal. But about 2am after finishing talking to Li Xiang on the phone, I witness my computer turning off by itself. I was like WTF? I immediately try turning back on, but it will automatically off after passing BIOS (I tried it like 5 times). I decided to let it rest and then after 15 minutes, I turn it back on again and it works as per normal. I check whether the bottom of my PSU’s fan is spinning and to my horror, it is not spinning. I took a sharp object and twirl the PSU’s fan to get its engine started, it spinned by itself eventually after a few twirls. I went to sleep after that.

Again, when I woke up, it is so quiet, then I realized it is time to change my PSU. Went to Funan’s PK Computer in the afternoon to get a Cooler Master 430 watts PSU for $70.

At night came back home from school, dismantled my old PSU and fixed the new one in. This time my computer is so much quieter and I managed to play 2 games of C&C3 without my computer automatically restart. Previously, whenever I play 3D intensive games like C&C3, CS and even DotA, 15 minutes into the game, my computer will automatically restart. I tried many ways to debug this issue, but apparently it is due to my PSU not giving enough power to my ATI Radeon X800 and hence it decided to ask my CPU to restart.

Moral of the story is never to get a cheap PSU and always get a PSU with higher watts.