Know About Power Supply: an Introduction to Power Supply

An Introduction to power supply

Nidec Industrial Solutions is an Italian multinational company based in Milan, that designs and manufactures rotating electrical machines, Power electronics and industrial automation. It was founded in 2012 with the acquisition of Ansaldo Sistemi Industriali by Nidec Corporation. Working in electrical engineering, designs and manufactures of electric motors and generators, power electronics and control systems and automation for industrial applications, Nidec Industrial Solutions was founded in 2012 when Nidec, a Japanese multinational corporation listed on the TYO: 6594 and NYSE:NJ, NJ and ON TOPIX 100 Component and Nikkei, acquired Ansaldo Sistemi Industriali (ASI). ASI, an industrial branch of the Ansaldo Group, was privatized in 2000. Its markets include petrochemical, energy, steel, marine and industrial automation.

Nidec Industrial Solutions (formerly Ansaldo Sistemi Industriali) as a former Finmeccanica company, shares its history and its roots with the history of Italian company Ansaldo, founded in 1853 in Sampierdarena (Genoa district), then merged in 1993 in the Finmeccanica group.

Is there anyway to test a computers Power Supply?

You test a power supply by (simply) replacing it with a known good one.

I know there are people going to answer this question by saying you use a power supply tester or a voltmeter or a multimeter...

The problem with that approach is...if the power supply is so far gone that a VOLTMETER (or power supply tester) can tell you that it's bad...

Before you use the voltmeter or power supply tester, you will be nearly 100% certain that the power supply is indeed bad.

So, a voltmeter or power supply tester is redundant. (it can only tell you what you already know)

Another problem with a voltmeter or power supply tester is that a good percentage (90% or better) of BAD power supplies will test good on a voltmeter or power supply tester. This is because the average voltmeter (for example) has no way to graph voltage levels over time, and under varying load conditions. Knowing that the 12V rail is 12.13V DC at this given second doesn't give you any useful information at all.

Basically, unless you want to invest tens of thousands of dollars in specialized test equipment (load boxes, graphing o'scopes, etc)...

The best way to "test" a power supply is to replace it with a known good one. At worst, this test should cost you about 75 bucks...and it might eliminate the problem at the same time (time saver).

As for your current problem...if you smelled burning plastic, there's a good chance that whatever caused the smell left some visual clue behind. Take your system apart and examine CLOSELY the front and back of each "board" to look for burnt or disfigured components. Also check that all (ALL) of your fans are still running.

Computer won't boot after a power outage of power supply

The best solution in cases like this since your equipment has no more warranty, is one of two: If you don´t really know what you are doing, DON´T DO IT, this makes things worst, so take it to a technician, or to a friend who can test and repair for you. The worst thing is trying to fix things that aren´t really damaged. If you know what you are doing, let´s go:The first thing is to open the computer and test essencial pieces, always being very careful with your equipment ( remember static electricity ).

01 - Begin by testing your power supply.

If the power supply is faulty, the rest won´t work at all.02 - If the power supply is good, you should test bios, motherboard and CPU. Make a bios reset, by taking out the battery and putting the jumper which control bios reset on the reset position, wait for about 30 seconds and then put it back.

03 - You could test the power supply in the other computer in order to see if it´s good, but beware ! If the power supply is faulty, it could damage your other computer, so, there´s a solution, that is locating the power supply wires which turns it on, so, you could turn on the power supply without a computer, and with a multimeter, testing the voltages. ( the contrary may work: If the power supply is not good, you could bring the other computer power supply and test on it ).04 - The most precious thing: You could and should check if your data on HD is intact, by putting the hard disc on other computer and see if it works.

It it works, you could use a software called Acronis True Image ( or similar ) and make an image of the whole disk just in case. With this image, you can transfer the content back to the HD or to a new HD ( if necessary, some power problems could cause HD failure, but many times we can retrieve the information ) without losing any data. This has helped me a lot. Even yesterday, I had a problem like yours that my windows 7 wouldn´t boot up, blue screen.

I simply put the Acronis True Image disk on the drive, booted up by it, located the image file on an external hard disk and restored the whole partition in 10 minutes. So, in 10 minutes, my PC was back on business with no problem. I highy recommend creating images of your boot disks from time to time.

HDs are very impredictable pieces.

Good luck.