Hello all,

I guess my main PC is toast. The power source went dead. It was I believe 115V 250 Watts maximum; I replaced it with a 250 watts maximum, but 110V instead since that was all I had available. It powered up, and would work for a while, but I think the 110V might be a culprit for the PC dying or restting during gslapt upgrade, or just by being on for about 10 minutes.

What are your opinions?

Upon the previous power supply burning out, I fear also whether all the components including hard drives linked to power supply were also fried or something.

I tend to smell something on the PC board now, and it heats up very fast close to the fan.

I know I am a moron when it comes to PC hardware components?

So what do you suggest?

The PC in qeustion is a athlon XP 2200, 512 MB RAM, 160 GB hard drive
I have tried pclinux os, mepis, and vector soho 5.1.2. So far Vector is the closest to work, but then it resets and complains about syscall page faults neeeding reboot, and just stalls there indefinitly.

I think you need to do a little detective work to find out which part of the computer is causing the instability. I'll assume that the machine was working well before the original power supply died so that makes me thing the new Power Supply (or PS) is the problem.

1. Do you know why the prevous power supply died? did you change anything to the system configuration, was there a power surge of some kind? was there a brown out of some kind?

2. Break the system apart and test with known good hardware. If you can I'd pull the PS from another system and swap it in first thing. If that doesn't solve the problem you could try swaping the Hard Drive with something else known to be good. If thats still no good Then I tend to thing that the smell on the MB means it's smoked

Play around with a couple different configurations so see what works. If your still having stability issues I would suggest installing Slackware

Let me know how it works out