Melodie's House » power supply

Up and Running Again

melodieshouse — Fri, 29 May 2009 20:59:53 +0000

Finally, 5-1/2 weeks after the power supply failed on my iMac G5 *again*, and almost a month after I sent in a defective power supply for a warranty replacement, I received the new part today and I’m happily working on my iMac G5 again. Due to poor communication on the part of the company I purchased the power supply from, I will no longer be doing business with them (my husband and I have purchased Mac parts from them several times for clients as well as ourselves). So we have to find another supplier of new parts for out-of-warranty Macs. Oh well. But I’m very happy to have my iMac back up and running, because that lil’ ‘ol G4 iMac is getting rather long in the tooth and it was neither powerful nor fast enough for me to efficiently get my work done.

Mac Withdrawal

melodieshouse — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:18:34 +0000

I’m suffering from full-blown Mac withdrawal :’( . On Monday evening my iMac G5 started emitting that burning smell again, and it seems the power supply, which is only 3 months old and replaced one which went the same way, is defective. So I’m working from a Linux (!) workstation, my trusty Sony VAIO which formerly ran Vista, since there’s not an extra Windows box up and running around the house right now. Fortunately the Mac’s power supply is still under warranty and I’m able to get it replaced free, but I’ve got to be without it a few days more while I wait for the replacement. Linux is neat and all that (though still not as neat as a Mac running OS X) and this computer I’m working from still has some configuration issues - I can’t access the rest of the computers on our LAN nor is it visible to the others even though I turned that capability on (Samba). I have to manually edit a file and I really don’t have time for that mess, but I’m running on only two cylinders here, KWIM?

At least I have Gmail and webmail access to all my other email accounts.

Smoke Happens

melodieshouse — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 05:35:10 +0000

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?