Hi,

Not a big hardware person. My system has 1000MB memory, 1 CPU and is running linux. The system over the past 2 weeks crashes and I have to pull the plug to get the system to reboot. The power button does nothing.

I opened the case and power on the system and the power supply fan is not spinning. Does this point to the power supply slowly dying?

Thanks

The power supply fan is very important, especially if you have no other fans in the case (apart from the CPU fan).

If it fails then you will find that your system overheats and randomly crashes. If left unattended for long enough, your PSU could also suffer damage from the heat, and may even catch on fire.

It's just possible that some weird ACPI setting has turned off the fan; you can check this by booting with the command-line option You could also look in the BIOS settings to make sure that it hasn't been turned off there.

It's more likely that your PSU has developed a fault. Unless you can take it apart and test it, I would suggest that it would be worth replacing it.

The power supply button fault could be caused by any of the following:
- not plugged in to the motherboard (or plugged into the wrong place)
- dust on the contacts (you can fix this with tweezers provided the computer is turned off)
- the button could be disabled in the BIOS or by a jumper on the motherboard.

Thanks. The system is trying to come and do a filesystem check. After that I will reboot and check the bios setting and run the command you suggest. I will get back to you.
Thanks