Hi, Trying for context. On Thu, 18 Jul 2024, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
So for old spinning hard disks (not modern solid state drives), power consumption is usually in the 5 to 10 watts, but could be 15 watts for some of the older ones from 25 or 30 years ago. Not sure which ones h> you have in this machine. But worst case call it 50 watts for 3 drives.
Pentium 3 processor at 1GHz is up to 35 watts. A couple watts per stick of memory if I remember right and a bit for the chip set on the board.
This is most helpful thank you!
It does not seem like that should overload most power supplies. I think power supplies under 200 watt were pretty rare, although I am sure Dell would have tried to put a 180 or even 150 watt power supply in a machine to save a few dollars. While I cannot be certain, I feel sure the boxed one I have is 300, perhaps higher. Its odd what you say about memory, the machine I had to replace had a great deal more memory, then I believe is in this one, but this machine is far louder than any unit I have ever owned. At one point the computer was so warm that the time and date was changing every 2 minutes or so, jumping ahead.
If the fan has failed, that will definitely make the power supply unhappy and the heat could very wall make it less stable at managing the voltages too.
Thanks for that extra wisdom as well. Any serious danger with my cutting power as I have to due to the power button factor? It worries me slightly, at their best, those switches only kick in with a power failure of some kind.
Is the cd-rom internal or USB?
Its internal, in fact the lose cables are floating around inside the case as well. I do have a USB DVD / cd burner that would be a gift to have in place just now. all of my statements, bank for example, come in an alternative format sent on cd..and I cannot read them. You mentioned a DOS USB driver (looks neat,
I had no idea someone had made that) so maybe the cd-rom was an external USB. Yet another reason why I wish the driver was properly installed. Panasonic created the DOS driver for some of their own equipment, with an engineer a few years back finding it for me. Some of the documentation is actually in Japanese. Granted freedos has a couple of DOS USB drivers, I have a second one as well. I am actually typing on a USB keyboard with that function turned on in the bios, no driver required. of! now that I think of it, are there USB to whatever keyboard adapters? Cheers, Karen
-- Len Sorensen