You can try running without stuff. Half the memory, swap out the hard drive etc. If you are lucky it isn't the system board. A way to check the power itself is to plug in a cheap digital clock. If it is blinking 12 after the failure it is power.
| Could you tell me what kind of problems have you heard of from using the | surge protector with no ground?
The surge protection attempts to clamp high voltages to ground when they reach a certain level. If there is no ground, the circuit is ineffective as the surge impulse will return, or jump over to the other line.
| I want to add that whenever the PC shuts down, it won't just turn back on | by pressing the button. I have to unplug the PC and wait a few minutes then | plug it back in again and turn it back on. There is no specific time of the | day or particular program I have open at these times. I can say that it has | always been within 2-3 minutes after I turn the PC on.
The motherboard chip that controls the power operation probably gets into an unusable state due to errors in the glitch. On some boards pressing reset for 3 seconds, then power, may correct it. Otherwise, switching off or unplugging the power supply is necessary to bring the system entirely down.
As a practice, when I "turn off" a PC, I power off with the system power button, then switch off the power strip / surge protector, then unplug it. I'm not often doing that as I run Linux which just about never needs a reboot. And when I need to it's due to a thunderstorm (I've seen hits by lightning that would vaporize a power strip).
Those were the two places I suspected. Sorry.
The outlet you are plugging the power cord into?
Another reason to suspect the power outlet. It could be the single outlet in the power strip. Plug it into another hole.
Huh?
A typical surge protector will have clamping between and among the three wires to your plug. IOW: it will still offer protection against a higher than normal voltage on the HOT wire to the NEUTRAL wire.
Since the NEUTRAL and GROUND wires are bonded at the service entrance, you just aren't going to see large inpulse voltages between NEUTRAL and GROUND.
If you have two wire (no separate ground) to a computer with a lot of three wire (separate ground) plugs, you have computer with a "floating" chassis. The surge protector will limit the impulse level beween the chassis and the HOT or NEUTRAL wires.
>|> | Could you tell me what kind of problems have you heard of from using | the |> | surge protector with no ground? |>
|> The surge protection attempts to clamp high voltages to ground when they |> reach a certain level. If there is no ground, the circuit is ineffective |> as the surge impulse will return, or jump over to the other line. | | Huh? | | A typical surge protector will have clamping between and among the three | wires to your plug. IOW: it will still offer protection against a higher | than normal voltage on the HOT wire to the NEUTRAL wire.
Which is not the substantial surge that can destroy things without you knowing.
| Since the NEUTRAL and GROUND wires are bonded at the service entrance, you | just aren't going to see large inpulse voltages between NEUTRAL and GROUND.
There definitely are surges on the neutral. Load imbalance causes a lot.
| If you have two wire (no separate ground) to a computer with a lot of three | wire (separate ground) plugs, you have computer with a "floating" chassis. | The surge protector will limit the impulse level beween the chassis and the | HOT or NEUTRAL wires.
And you may or may not be crossing the float between them. You're not giving a complete description so I can't say what will happen here.
If the neutral and hot go up at the same time the net impact on the PC is nil. Most electronic damage is really caused by the cables other than power which connect, usually the phone line. The ground shift between the phone or modem cable will be resolved in the PC. That is the main problem when you are dealing with grounding issues. It is important to insure that your cable, phone and power all connect to the same ground electrode system and that you have point of entry surge protection there. Point of use protection is only to protect from voltages induced in wires within the home. A point of use protector should also clamp all inputs to the device to the same ground point. A standalone PC is pretty much immune to power surges because of the design of the power supply. It is when you start plugging communication stuff into it (TelCo, LANs, TV cable) that you create the problem.
Its an NT based OS. Therefore the system (Event) logs are a major source of information. If you don't know where the event logs are, then use Windows Help to locate and read them. If they make no sense, then post the recent information from that log.
Also what sometimes provides > "w_tom"
In another post, you stated:
You also mentioned flickering lights. There is a circuit on motherboard to control power supply. If power line voltage rises and falls too often too fast, then this circuit locks out. It is hardware protection that can only be reset by removing power cord from wall. Is that (type of surge) where your problem lies? Symptoms are correct. This type of surge could be creates by an intermittent arcing wire inside walls. Also typical of a surge that no surge protector would ever see because it is not a voltage transient.
Furthermore, could not safety ground make this circuit trip into safety cutoff? Maybe, but we don't have circuit details to say for sure.
Just another reas> ...
On 06 Jun 2004 14:55:05 GMT Greg wrote: |>Which is not the substantial surge that can destroy things without you |>knowing. | | If the neutral and hot go up at the same time the net impact on the PC is nil.
That depends on the type of surge.
| Most electronic damage is really caused by the cables other than power which | connect, usually the phone line. The ground shift between the phone or modem | cable will be resolved in the PC. That is the main problem when you are | dealing with grounding issues. It is important to insure that your cable, phone | and power all connect to the same ground electrode system and that you have | point of entry surge protection there. Point of use protection is only to | protect from voltages induced in wires within the home. A point of use | protector should also clamp all inputs to the device to the same ground point. | A standalone PC is pretty much immune to power surges because of the design of | the power supply. It is when you start plugging communication stuff into it | (TelCo, LANs, TV cable) that you create the problem.
This probably is the biggest source of PC surge damage.
I once had a surge damage a stereo system. The tweeters in the speakers were melted. All 8 final transistors were blown. Replace all that and it was working again. The stereo was off and unplugged when it happened. The cause was probably the fact that I had about 60 feet of speaker cable coiled up in the closet because I had temporarily moved the stereo from its normal location where it needed the long cable to this room where it didn't, but I didn't want to cut the cable and have to buy new cable (it was finely stranded AWG 8).
At first, I thought this would have no effect on your PC.
Then I remembered having to isolate emi filters in PC power supplies years ago because they have line to ground caps.
The filter depends on the ground being there to dump interference or noise onto.
Not sure if this is the cause of any flickering or would really hurt the PC or not, but I thought I would add this little tidbit to your answers....
"w_tom" Hi, I took the new hard drive out and have the original one back in. Just didn't want to take any chances with messing my new hard drive up. I've not had any shutdowns since I reinstalled the hard drive with the bad sectors. I checked the Device Manager and there are no problems there. I will change the hard drive out again and look at the system (event) logs and device manager to see what I can find. Thanks, DJ
"w_tom" How can I have this "intermittent arcing wire inside walls" checked out? Would I need an electrician to check this or is it something I could do? Thanks, DJ
Phil I have dial-up service, would my PC be at risk here also. DJ
Greg I do have 2 separate hard drives, that I switched out and still had the problem. How would I change to half the memory? Thanks DJ
Hi Kilowatt I've tried that.Maybe I should try a totally different wall socket. Thanks DJ
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