Harvesting Good Parts From The Dell Inspiron 545s Power Supply

[@tallboyyyy]

I kind of figured it would be a crapacitor problem. Either that or a blown transformer but since you mentioned this computer was made during the great plague my first guess would be crapacitors.

[@jaykay18]

This one is kind of a mixed bag, anybody's game. The power supply that was in this was actually manufactured by AcBel, Dell and HP used to buy their supplies from them a lot. Remember, it's all about the lowest bidder. According to Wikipedia, capacitor plague ran through 2007. This machine was manufactured in 2009. I got it in 2011 and it still worked. Could it be that Wikipedia is wrong? I think so, because I have proof of many machines that have failed caps, and I don't think 2007 is a good cutoff date because I was seeing blown caps well into 2012 or 2013 easily. Typically these would have failed long ago. Could it be that this was in the range Wikipedia stated and sat around for years? Maybe AcBel had a huge stockpile of "fraudulent" capacitors they bought up in bulk while they were dirt cheap, and kept using them. Perhaps, despite the power-on hours of this machine being at maximum 20,000 hours, it was simply an early failure? Or the supply isn't really cracked up to be what it's made out to be--in that they often fail in these small form factor machines. I don't know for sure, but typically a power supply has a MTBF of at least 100,000 hours There could be a million reasons why this failed. But the fact that SO MANY of them failed, especially during an extended period of non-use, tends to indicate to me these are capacitor plague caps.