F-16 suspends my *desktop* after 30 minutes at the gdm , making it impossible to ssh in

[Przemek Klosowski]

On 10/03/2011 05:37 AM, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

> 3. uses a high efficiency low-noise PSU, which does not like power ups
> at all (in fact restarting the computer now takes a dozen tries, with
> minutes waiting for caps to drain ; yes I could change the hardware but
> it works fine under load and a new PSU is how many years of energy
> savings again ?).

If your PS has trouble starting because of faulty caps, it's probably 
not because they are draining---on the contrary, they are probably worn 
out and leaky (electrically), causing trouble for the startup circuit 
which wasn't designed for the extra losses. Often you can identify the 
failing electrical capacitors because their casing is swollen or maybe 
even burst open and leaking the actual electrolyte.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

You'd have to disassemble the power supply to see that, however, and 
there are possibly dangerous voltages inside even for some time after 
disconnecting the power, so I don't recommend doing that.

The bottom line is that the power supply is probably on the fritz and 
likely to fail altogether. Decent power supplies aren't that expensive, 
I recently got a nice, quiet one for around $30-40.