Comment Anything made by HP (Score 1) 307
-Anything I've had made by HP has broken way before it's time.
-Power supplies: When I lived in my last house I was only a mile away from a power sub-station. The voltage was high (125VAC). But the worst part was that - when you have that little wire in between you and a power station that blows up (lightning would strike a transformer or something... You could often see a bright flash of blue light followed by a BANG! (not thunder - definitely)) - the current spikes that occur when the power goes out are BRUTAL on the power supply. My EE degree has me think it's because wire carries some inductance, the longer the wire, the more the spike is "smoothed out". When you have no inductance, the power going from 125 to 0 instantly causes an infinite (by math - real world has other factors that never make it infinite) current to go through all of your electronics that are plugged into the wall for an instant in time. a TRUE spike, the current is infinite and the dt is zero. Reality is (I'm pulling these numbers out of my ass) more like 100,000 volts for a microsecond. Now that I live many miles away from a power station, I haven't lost a power supply.
FYI: When a power supply fails in a machine, usually the mode of failure is such that certain pathways stop working. First power supply I lost, the machine would boot up but eventually blue screen, Eventually it wouldn't boot up. At first it appeared to be disk related. It wasn't. When I finally checked the power supply, one of the 12V rails was down to like 8V.
So, my point is, a lot of times it appears that something else is wrong - but always be suspicious of the power supply....