First post, by Baoran
I have had my father's old pc stored for over 10 years since he started using a laptop instead of a desktop pc for his business.
The PC is a socket A system from 2001 and it does have a cheap power supply. I decided to test it out in case it might have some retro uses since it is 19 years old.
When I first tried to turn it on the fans turned on but after few seconds it made a one long beep and then turned itself back off automatically. First I removed all the cards except video card and tried it again and it did same thing again.
I removed power cables from the optical drive and the hard drive and after that it did post without problems. After reconnecting the hard drive it did post again and it almost managed to boot itself to windows xp. It got stuck at the welcome screen and since there was hard drive activity I left it there for a while. After coming back to it 15 minutes later it was still in the welcome screen and I tried doing ctrl-alt-del and by some miracle doing that caused the desktop to show up.
It had been on probably half an hour when I decided to check the voltages from a molex connector. 5V showed 5.5V so that was ok, but when I checked 12V it showed 13.5V which I thought was bit high. I left the multimeter connected to 12V in molex and I noticed something. The voltage was gradually lowering when I watched the multimeter screen. Voltage went down until after 5 minutes of watching it reached 12V and then it stopped going down at exactly 12V. Since I had already been running the PC for half an hour I wonder how high the voltage had been originally when I started the PC. PSU probably has a problem and perhaps the optical drive as well or the problem posting had something to do with too high voltage in 12V rail while having the optical drive connected.
Unfortunately I am not sure if it is safe to use the pc with that psu. Since it is a socket A system it probably needs lots of amps from 5V rail so I am not sure if getting a new psu would be worth it considering any retro uses it might have and how weak 5V rail modern PSUs have. I might be expensive to find a good psu for it that would work. On the other hand it would be a period correct pc from 2001 when the windows xp came out and it might even work for dos as well (perhaps).
I would appreciate if anyone has any ideas related to this. I have not yet turned off the computer while writing this and the 12V rail seems to stay stable at pretty much exactly 12V since it gradually went down. It wasn't originally an expensive system in 2001, so I am kind of torn between trying something with it and just letting it go and taking it to a recycling center.
