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Tom's Hardware Compares Power Supplies
Some guy wrote in to say "Tom's Hardware Guide takes a hard look at power supplies to find out if we are getting what we paid for. The results of the testing were very surprising." Very useful to anyone who has built their own machine from scratch or burned out a cheap power supply.
Wow, we killed tomshardware, maybe his power supply went!
It sounds as if power supply makers are taking a marketing lesson from audio amplifier companies... bigger is better, and no-one ever actually verifies those numbers.
My favorite was a $25 amp car audio amp I bought about 10 years ago. I kid you not, this thing is about 2x the size of a deck of cards, and is rated at 500W per channel. Ha ha ha ha! No, I didn't buy it for it's amazing power, I bought it because it was $25 and I needed a cheap amp for some tinkering!
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
Inadequate and Deceptive Product Labeling:
Comparison of 21 Power Supplies
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Full Load and Overload - Power Supply Units Pushed to the Limits
Hehe...
I know you're thinking novice... But he's a software engineer
You learned the wrong lesson.
Lesson to be learned:
Never, Never, Never let a software engineer touch the hardware.
Since I am from the old school of computing technology (where off is actually off, none of this soft-on/off crap) it surprised me when I was putting in some dimms into a friend's HP that the RAM slots were powered for some reason (no, it was not in sleep mode). I pushed on the dimm and suddenly saw a bright point of light and little puff of smoke. I yanked the dimm out, only to find that one of the gold traces on the dim got so hot it melted the epoxy (or whatever holds it onto the pcb) that held it on and soldered itself to the dimm slot on the pc. So I ended up using a twice as large dimm in the other slot.
Moral of the story is unplug the power cable (we all do that don't we). Nothing gets your heart going like electricity! Like the time I was putting in a gable fan in my attic and cut a live wire with my T-Cutter's. THAT was a bigger spark, and burnt a nice big hole in the cutters. At least I got to exchange them at Home Depot
ngoy
(I'm still alive! Darwin ain't got nothin' on me!)
--ngoy
And besides,
maybe if
Tom put more than
two or three lines
of text
on each page
and 25K of
banner ad HTML
his server
wouldn't get
slashdotted
so easily.