OctoPower!

OctoPower!

We have several computers at the house.  The “big” computer is at least seven years old.  It’s “big” only in that it is an old tower case from back when they made computers the size of dresser drawers and it’s “big” because we hooked up a huge tv monitor to it quite awhile back.  This computer has been through several versions of Windows, each of which grew flakier until I finally tried Ubuntu on this machine.  That continues to work smoothly on the old beast – except for some incompatibility with some DVDs.  It suffered the loss of its ethernet port in a lightning strike a few years ago.  The ethernet port connects directly to the motherboard so I didn’t see any practical way to replace it.  So now it connects to the internet via a USB WIFI stick.  Aside from the fact that it is still serviceable, I keep it going to see how long I can keep it going.

The other day I pressed the power button to turn it on and nothing – absolutely nothing – happened.  No lights, no fan, nothing.  Probably the power supply I thought.  This was a good guess but I foolishly assumed that it would be a snap out and snap in replacement.  Hah!

This, this is what a power supply looks like.  Except, here, this has been laid out for viewing before being laid to rest:

Most, but not all of those cables were connected here and there in the computer.  When I saw the spaghetti inside the computer that I would have to disconnect and correctly reconnect I flashed back to an old Star Trek episode, one of the lesser episodes of the original series, called “Spock’s Brain.”  Spock’s brain is stolen – right out of his head – by beings who need it to be the “Controller” for their civilization.  Upon recovering it, Dr. McCoy’s surgical skills are temporarily, technologically augmented to enable him to reinsert Spock’s brain inside Spock.  But the augmented knowledge begins to wear off and he goes slower and slower…

I could just imagine myself grinding to a halt, connector in hand, whimpering, “Where the hell does this one go?”

Eventually I settled for a tedious process of disconnecting one cable belonging to the old power supply, locating a comparable connector from the new power supply and connecting that – gradually replacing the old and allowing me to remove the old one and replace it.  Here is what it look like midway through that.  The new power supply is sitting outside the computer at this point.

What really tickles me about all this is that I got it right all the way down the line: the right diagnosis, a compatible power supply purchased on the first try, the machine started up right away and everything worked.  So often technical adventures consist of, like, six trials and errors and three ah-hah! Revelations before completing a repair or install.

Here is the pc with the new power supply installed.  All those cables coming out really do look like the tentacles of an octopus don’t they?