Oh Great! My System Has Just Died

[K-61]

I had GWX2 installed and running fine for a few days and now my system is out of action. I mentioned a power cut I had in my house yesterday in my "battery backup" thread. I have my gaming rig connected to a UPS, but it is about three years old; I don't know if its ability to handle surges declines with time, but the battery is still fairly strong. I'll be very upset to discover it failed and let a surge through to damage my system. My wife plugged in her hairdryer yesterday and the circuit breaker for the top floor of my house triggered. My UPS began to beep, indicating that it was running on battery. I saved and exited my game, shut down the system, reset the breaker and then powered up again. I played GWX for a few more hours, then shut down and went out of town to visit my brother.

When I got home last night, my computer wouldn't boot up fully. I have some power; one of my DVD drives powers up but the other one is 100% dead. I switched power from the one that works but still nothing. I then connected the power lead from the dead drive to the working one and it powered up too, so the one DVD drive is definitely dead. There is no signal to my LCD, nor do I hear any sounds from my hard drives nor any system beeps. The front panel lights are on. So, it seems I have partial power, but not enough to get the system to POST or spin up the hard drives. My suspicion is that the power cut damaged the PSU which continued to work until I shut down the system. I have a spare PSU in my inventory, so this afternoon's project will be to connect the spare one and test the system. My worst fear is that other components are damaged. But I'll not panic until I try the PSU swap after lunch. We've got a ton of snow on the ground here in southern Ontario, so it's not as if I am going anywhere soon.