Smoke Happens
Posted by mom2mom on January 25, 2009
Well, the power supply went bad on my G5 on Wed, after having it for only 10 days! I was sitting here at the computer using it while a burning smell permeated out into the room but I couldn’t smell it at my desk. My 5yo smelled it though and made a big deal of it. Then my husband came home and immediately came upstairs and smelled it. I was still happily computing away, typing e-mails. So I got up and walked around and caught the smell, sniffed around the computer but couldn’t really smell anything, felt all around it and the screen felt unusually warm. So I saved my e-mail that I was composing and shut down. My husband opened up the computer and took the power supply out. Lo and behold there was a scorched spot on the housing. He then opened up the power supply and found a transformer that had overheated to the point of becoming brittle and turning the copper wire around it black. I should have snapped a pic but didn’t think to.
The 20″ iMac G5 was subject to a warranty extension due to a known issue with bad power supplies and logic board components. The warranty was extended from 1 to 2 yrs specifically for those components only. However this Mac is over 3-1/2 yrs old, so we had to eat this one. Happily, I was able to get a new after-market power supply from DV Warehouse (great source for after-market Mac parts) for $119 (yes, that’s fairly cheap for a Mac power supply, I know you can get a PC power supply for $40 but we’re talking apples and oranges here, pun intended). I had it Fed-Ex’ed and we got it before noon the next day (Thu). Took my hubby 5 min. to put back in and get my Mac fired up and running (as opposed to fired up and burning). I was so happy! I suffer major withdrawal if I don’t have access to a computer for a day, so to get by I used my VAIO with Linux on it for an evening, thank God for webmail!
I shudder to think how much damage could have been done if I’d kept on working, oblivious to the smell, until my computer stopped working. If the logic board had been taken out we’d have been in for a very expensive repair. I was also out of town last weekend for 3 days and left my Mac on unattended so I could access it remotely if need be. What if the power supply burned up then?
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