Date: 2006-07-08 14:49:00
slow boat

After being in the care of the international postal system for just over eight weeks, our three remaining boxes arrived from Canada! These boxes contained things that we had kept with us while we were in Canada, and things that we would have liked to receive and use right away on arriving in New Zealand. Because of various delays and super slow shipping, we received them about three months after we had wanted them. But thanks Mom and Dad for the fantastic packing job!

Among these boxes was my desktop computer. I fired it up today after unpacking everything:

Mar  1 13:54:37 elise syslogd: exiting on signal 15
Jul  7 19:35:34 elise syslogd: kernel boot file is /boot/kernel/kernel

Clearly I remembered the critical point - to switch the power supply from the 115V setting to 230V. I'm curious, does anybody know what actually happens if you forget to do that?

Now that I finally have the master copy of our web sites, I can update them with some pictures we have taken over the past four months.

Now, to figure out where to put all the rest of the stuff that arrived...

Comment

[info]kafkatx
2006-07-08T04:19:32Z
I was at a customer site in the UK with a Sparc10 from the US and forgot to change the power supply. We happily plugged in the machine and turned it on not thinking anything about power. There was a really loud *CRACK* followed by a bit of smoke and that was it. Sun service came out, replaced the power supply, and fired it up. No other damage, but maybe I was just lucky.
[info]negtyer
2006-08-02T16:50:15Z
Gosh! I made the same mistake few mins ago with dell! There is no way to fix it? Could you let me know how much to replace the supply?
[info]kafkatx
2006-08-02T17:28:49Z
God knows... My experience was in summer of 2000, nothing recent, and I've never had to buy a power supply outside the US. If you replace it yourself (which isn't THAT difficult) should only cost whatever the power supply is--IF you haven't fried more than that.
[info]negtyer
2006-08-02T17:35:59Z
Beat me, I open the case (a latest version) and it's like a maze...
[info]edm : Magic smoke
2006-07-08T04:52:34Z

Clearly I remembered the critical point - to switch the power supply from the 115V setting to 230V. I'm curious, does anybody know what actually happens if you forget to do that?


The magic smoke escapes.



If you're lucky you only have to replace the power supply, but occassionally other things commit suicide in their attempt to save the power supply. Interestingly some of the better (desktop) PC power supplies now cover the 100-250V range automatically (as do pretty much all the other appliances I own).



Ewen

[info]ghewgill : Re: Magic smoke
2006-07-10T11:06:16Z
Yeah, all the power bricks that we brought support a wide enough range of input voltages. Only the desktop machine needed a manual prod (and I checked that it had such a switch before packing it!).
[info]bovineone
2006-07-08T05:43:40Z
Jonathon blew out the power-brick on my scrolling LED sign when he borrowed it for a conference in Europe. Replacing the power-brick with a new one let it work again without problems.
[info]taral
2006-07-08T20:54:18Z
Depends on which way and how good the PS is.

Switch: 230, Supply: 115 -- PS does nothing.
Switch: 115, Supply: 230 -- PS does nothing (if quality) or blows up (if not).
[info]ghewgill
2006-07-10T11:07:23Z
I'm going to go with "blows up". This is a basic Dell workstation bought a couple of years ago. I don't expect them to use a quality power supply. :)
Greg Hewgill <greg@hewgill.com>