bard
New Member
For most of my email traffic I use a Digital Venturis FP 466, vintage ca. 1995. It's a 486, 20 MB of RAM, 2 WD HDDs, 812 MB each, running W95B. It's been very dependable until last night. When I pushed the power button the fan started, the hard drives spun up, each one made its popcorn-popping sound for about a second apiece, and . . . that's as far as it went. From that point, it was just the sound of the drives and the fan spinning. The monitor behaved as though the computer had never been turned on. A spare monitor did the same.
I shut it off, waited a few minutes and tried again, three or four times. Same story.
Today I tried again, watching and listening carefully, to know what to report here. Again the same story.
But this time when I shut it off, waited a couple of minutes and tried again, it booted normally--not a hint of any kind of problem.
I suspect a bad connection in the power supply, like maybe some components are getting power every time, but sometimes something else is not.
Does that sound plausible?
I shut it off, waited a few minutes and tried again, three or four times. Same story.
Today I tried again, watching and listening carefully, to know what to report here. Again the same story.
But this time when I shut it off, waited a couple of minutes and tried again, it booted normally--not a hint of any kind of problem.
I suspect a bad connection in the power supply, like maybe some components are getting power every time, but sometimes something else is not.
Does that sound plausible?
