I came home on Friday to find that a circuit breaker had tripped. I reset the breaker and found that my other Dell notebook would not turn on. I swapped power supplies and found that the computer would boot, so I figured the power supply had died and tripped the breaker. I believe that there was an overdraw within some component of the computer that led to the death of the power supple. Specifically, my wife's iPod would sometimes not draw a charge off the USB port and we had some other USB problems. A friend thinks it was just time for the power supply to go and the USB stuff was coincidental. Can anyone help settle this bet?

usb ports are low current, 500mA max, iirc. so most likely just a side effect of a dieing supply.

i had a similiar problem with a power supply. everything would power on but anything pci related wouldn't work, like the monitor and the usb and stuff.