On Thu, 2005-10-13 at 18:09 +0100, Mark Rogers wrote:
A good 130W PSU is worth much more than the cheapo 350W PSUs found in a typical budget PC
I'll second that, I am not sure of the point in time when it became acceptable to completely lie about equipment specifications but as Mark says any cheap Power Supply (or the power supplies found in cheap cases) will not perform to anything like it's so called specification.
I'll add that as well as causing the confusing stability issues Mark mentions. The PSU is about the only component that can result in the destruction of all the other components.
A previous employer of mine used to furnish their 3D artists with (what were then) very respectable workstations. Twin Processors, Gig of Ram (back when 128 was respectable and 256 was a lot), SCSI Drives and an amazingly expensive (£2k) 3Dlabs Graphics card. We had a spate of PSU failures (before we decided to replace all of them). In some cases the whole machine was fried, in one case the only parts that I could find that survived were the CPU fans (even the keyboard was dead !) Now obviously it was pretty silly of someone to put a machine where the memory alone was worth £1000 at the mercy of a cheapo PSU. But I think the lesson remains even on cheaper machines.
A dud PSU with insufficient over-voltage or output transient protection can destroy your hard drives quicker than you can say "where's my data gone".....Backups or not, the loss of a drive is at the very least inconvenient.