Warp wrote:

>   When your PC starts misbehaving clearly due to some hardware failure,
> the very first thing you do is check the PSU.
> 
>   In my experience 90% of PC hardware failures are caused by a failing PSU.

This does not match my experience.

I have seen PSUs die, and computers do very, very strange things as a 
result. But it's fairly rare. Rarer than, say, HD failures or fan failures.


has an expensive brand-name "performance" PSU - not that that 
conclusively proves anything.)

> The symptoms can be extremely varied, all the way from the diverse BIOS test
> failing (such as the CPU or RAM tests) to random crashes and reboots, as well
> as the booting process failing seeminlgy due to some disk error.
> 
>   If your PSU is failing, hardware tests (performed by BIOS or third-party
> software) are completely unreliable and tell you absolutely nothing.

I ran a RAM check, and it consistently tells me that one specific area 
of RAM isn't working. Every time I run the test, it complains about the 
same chunk, fairly high up in the computer's address space.

If the power supply was unstable, I'd expect to see random glitches all 
over the place, not just in one confined area.

The OS behaviour I'm seeing is also consistent with a RAM fault; 
initially the system works fine, until it tries to use that chunk, at 
which point it starts to malfunction spectacularly.

Perhaps more importantly, it will take me about 30 seconds to determine 
if a fried RAM module is the problem. Rewiring the PSU would take far 
longer, and the only PSU I have to test with *is* insufficiently 
powerful to run the PC.

So in summary, I think I'm looking at a broken RAM module, not a PSU 
fault. Although I guess it's possible a faulty PSU might be what _broke_ 
the RAM module in the first place...

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