Did Windows 7 blow my power supply?

[developer_al]

A few days ago I installed Windows 7 RTM on my Shuttle M1000 media centre. I was impressed. The installation is a breeze and it found all the hardware and drivers by itself. The only minor problem I had was, at first it only saw the tuner cards as analog & I needed to download the latest 88x Hauppauge drivers to get digital Freeview channels to be found. That was easy to do.

I like what Microsoft have done to Win7's media centre and its a good improvement over XP's version (Vista never worked on my M1000 so I reverted to XP). It even works with the teletext buttons now and the digital red button.

However, I needed to tune a few things in the power settings to make sure it stayed on all the time. When I pressed the sleep button on the remote control or the front of the unit, instead of sleeping, it seemed to go into hibernate mode, power down and leave the power light flashing in yellow. I'd never seen this state before. Under XP, it always went into 'Away Mode' instantly and the blue power light went out and the sound and video output were disabled but it was still mainly on, ready to record when scheduled.

I discovered that Vista and Win7 have a hybrid sleep mode which powers down more of the PC. Unfortunately this meant recordings were not done in this mode. I found out how to disable it but it made no difference, it still wanted to hibernate. I gave up and went to bed leaving the yellow power light flashing.

This morning, it wouldn't power on at all. I removed the power cord and pushed it back in case it was stuck in some standby mode. Then I felt the power supply, it was red hot. I still cannot get the PC to power on and I assume the PSU has blown and will need replacing if I can find one for that model.

Did Windows 7 put my power supply into some strange mode that caused it to overheat duing the night, I wonder ????

 

[Thrax]

An operating system is unable to perform any action that would harm a power supply. You are the victim of an unfortunate coincidence, I'm afraid.

 

[developer_al]

My tongue was in my cheek, but I thought the thread title might attract some interesting replies !!

I suppose it's not impossible that the ACPI mode that Windows 7 put the PSU into (different from how XP did it) was some final straw on already failing hardware.

I'd still like to understand more about the differences in sleep modes and why the hardware behaved differently. Does anyone else yet have experience of Win 7 RTM Media Centre?

 

[Kougar]

ACPI has been in use by Windows since WIndows 98...

It's possible Windows 7 may have put your borderline PSU over the edge, but it just as likely could've been just a matter of time.

This is important, was the PSU fan spinning or turned off when you noticed it was hot?

It may have turned off the fan while still supplying standby power to the system... if so have you tried disconnecting the power cable, waiting a few minutes (press and hold the power button for a second or two for good measure), then plugging ti back into the PSU and trying to power it on? You might need to hold down the power button for 5 seconds to reset the PSU.

If you can smell anything burnt then don't do this and toss the PSU instead... it's never a good idea to use a faulty PSU but I'm not fully sure yours is bad since this issue occured with the PC in a minimal power standby mode. There's some risk with my advice so this is your warning before you attempt it. Worst case scenario is if it truly is a faulty PSU then it could power on and surge, toasting stuff in the system.

 

[developer_al]

When I found it the next day, everything appeared to be powered off, no fans or anything. The lid was off the PC because I'd been swapping over hard drives the day before and I could feel the PSU was very hot.
Pressing the power-on now causes the power light to come and fans to start for about half a second and it switches off again. I have tried pulling the power cord completely. No difference, I'm afraid. Unfortunately this is a special PSU with non-standard connections to the boards and I cannot plug in a standard one to test. I'm going to call Shuttle today.

 

[mtheriault]

A few days ago I installed Windows 7 RTM on my Shuttle M1000 media centre. I was impressed. The installation is a breeze and it found all the hardware and drivers by itself. The only minor problem I had was, at first it only saw the tuner cards as analog & I needed to download the latest 88x Hauppauge drivers to get digital Freeview channels to be found. That was easy to do.

I like what Microsoft have done to Win7's media centre and its a good improvement over XP's version (Vista never worked on my M1000 so I reverted to XP). It even works with the teletext buttons now and the digital red button.

However, I needed to tune a few things in the power settings to make sure it stayed on all the time. When I pressed the sleep button on the remote control or the front of the unit, instead of sleeping, it seemed to go into hibernate mode, power down and leave the power light flashing in yellow. I'd never seen this state before. Under XP, it always went into 'Away Mode' instantly and the blue power light went out and the sound and video output were disabled but it was still mainly on, ready to record when scheduled.

I discovered that Vista and Win7 have a hybrid sleep mode which powers down more of the PC. Unfortunately this meant recordings were not done in this mode. I found out how to disable it but it made no difference, it still wanted to hibernate. I gave up and went to bed leaving the yellow power light flashing.

This morning, it wouldn't power on at all. I removed the power cord and pushed it back in case it was stuck in some standby mode. Then I felt the power supply, it was red hot. I still cannot get the PC to power on and I assume the PSU has blown and will need replacing if I can find one for that model.

Did Windows 7 put my power supply into some strange mode that caused it to overheat duing the night, I wonder ????

Good day
Had nearly the same problem today

I installed Win7 2 day ago. Only major problem, the sleep mode. I usualy put my system in this mode when not in use. Since i installed it, i have remarked that the system is not realy in sleep mode, only the fan inside of the power supply unit is shut off.

Problem, power supply over heat and smell very bad. Did try to restart the fan manually, did not work. Had to shut down the system and reboot.

Is the power supply fan is controlled by Windows.

Martin

 

[developer_al]

Good day
Had nearly the same problem today

I installed Win7 2 day ago. Only major problem, the sleep mode. I usualy put my system in this mode when not in use. Since i installed it, i have remarked that the system is not realy in sleep mode, only the fan inside of the power supply unit is shut off.

Problem, power supply over heat and smell very bad. Did try to restart the fan manually, did not work. Had to shut down the system and reboot.

Is the power supply fan is controlled by Windows.

Martin

Thanks for the replies guys. Here's an update on my original experience:
I took the PC to my bench and opened it to get the power supply part number and tried to find out if I could get a replacement from Shuttle as its a specially made type. That wasn't a very successful exercise as Shuttle turned out to be difficult to deal with.
After a couple of days sitting on the bench, I decided to plug it in to give it one final test and it all fired up okay.

It then worked fine for a couple of weeks and then one night it went into the same wierd mode where it looked dead again. On pressing the power button, the lights flashed for a few seconds and went out again. I tried pulling the mains plug for a while but that didn't help. I then left it all unplugged overnight and the next day it fired up okay again.

It has now been running fine for several weeks now (but I've kept the lid off, just in case!). I have made some adjustments to the power profile in Win7 and some registry tweaks for Away mode. I won't let it go into standby at all now.

Its not running perfectly but its useable. Here's a list of the known bugs I have:
1) The Media Centre response (via the remote or keyboard) sometimes has annoying delays and I have to fix this by closing and re-opening the Media Centre app.
2) When fast-forwarding recorded TV, it can get stuck and keeps going forward after you take your finger off the button then eventually it stops and its back where you started forwarding from.
3) I have lost audio on occasion. Its not muted and its not Windows audio levels. Just Media Centre itself doesn't output sound. It takes a bit of messing with volume controls in the control panel and then suddenly its back again.
4) Copying to DVD takes a very long time and then the DVD comes out blank!
5) The Away mode is still not quite right. Its not working like XP's does. Its simply a black video output more like a screen-saver and any touch of a button will bring it on.

Just to say I am impressed with Windows 7 and have installed it with very little problems on about 8 different systems now. Some with high specs some with quite low specs. One was a tablet PC and that works great. The performance is great. Its really Vista fixed at last (well it is really Windows 6.1 not 7 !!!).


Al.

 

[mtheriault]

Good morning / evening

I din't test the multimedia function. I did modification as mention from one member to the power function in the configuration panel. But still as the same problem.

Yesterday, my PSU was smelling very bad. So for the moment, i will shut it down completly.

Other problem with Win 7, does not fully recognise my usb keyboard. Functions key's are not available. I read that i need to hook my keyboard in the regular keyboard input in my main board.

Martin
Montreal, Canada

 

[clifford_cooley]

Other problem with Win 7, does not fully recognize my usb keyboard. Functions key's are not available. I read that i need to hook my keyboard in the regular keyboard input in my main board.

Hello Martin - Windows will use the standard keys but if the keyboard has special function keys. You may need to install a keyboard driver for the special function keys to work.

 

[mtheriault]

Hello Martin - Windows will use the standard keys but if the keyboard has special function keys. You may need to install a keyboard driver for the special function keys to work.

Hello Clifford

Windows recognize my keyboard as the good one "Digital media Pro" but will not load the appropriate driver. The disk that i have is for Win XP

This is an on going process. It will take sometime to get installed as i use to be with XP.

Have a great day
Martin

 

[Kuragari]

I had the same exact scenario a day or two after I installed Windows 7 on my system. I'm running on an older system :
EVGA 133-K8-NF41 motherboard
Athlon 3000+
3 gigs ram
2 IDE drives
1 sata drive
EVGA GeForce 8800 GT
3.5" floppy
DVD drive
2 case fans

I had the issue where my system would try to boot up, everything would light up for half a second and then shut off. I'd hit the switch on the power supply, turn it back on and it would boot up. After a day or two it then refused to turn on anymore. So I'm thinking it probably did push my PSU over the edge. It was a nearly 4 year old Antec Truepower 550W. I replaced it with an OCZ Fatality 550W modular. My only concern now is, will this new PSU be fried? Can anyone provide any further info on this?

 

[mtheriault]

Hello Kugary

My solution is to close down my system, never let it in low power mode. Since Win 7 is opening more rapidely than is predecessor , the problem is not less a concern.

Win 7 is a new system and i'm ready to give it a chance to resolve it. But i could predict a shortage in power supply after the mass introduction

Martin

 

[Kuragari]

Well I've got my settings put on "High Performance" modified to never sleep in any occasion. Now I'd just like M$ to do some research and fix this so it never happens again.

 

[firepin]

Hi guys just noticed your posts this evening about psu probs, last week i posted about a problem i had after my Acer desktop went into hibernation and would not past POST on rebooting , then would not power up at all i swapped the power suppy for a spare and after reseting the cmos all was fine,on the initial reboot the bios said that i was recovering from a failed hibernation attempt ??.
The psu was only a few months old as i had fitted a new Nvidia 9800gt at the same time. hence the spare psu.

 

[Kuragari]

Someone at M$ should be forced to read this thread.

 

[firepin]

Funny thing is I have read through some of the other forum/help sites that this problem has been quite common with the sleep/Hibernation settings, and forgot after reinstaling win7 to change the power settings and disable hibernation, I will be keeping it disabled
until I hear different. Talk about exploding iphones last thing you need is an exploding pc!.

 

[sixteen97]

Sorry for necroing this thread. Just wanted to add that I had the same psu issues when I installed windows 7 beta a couple months ago. Took out the psu and found the top two pins of the 12v cpu connector burned. Luckily nothing else was damaged, took win7 off, replaced the psu and have been good since.

 

[clifford_cooley]

Took out the psu and found the top two pins of the 12v cpu connector burned.

Don't blame Windows 7 for bad connections which will cause burnt connectors. The only way for an OS to blow a Power Supply is if the OS has control over your power supply fans. If the power supply fans are not being controlled properly, this will cause overheated components and result in a damaged Power Supply Unit. If you feel this is the case there are ways to disable PSU fan speed control.

Please keep in mind I am basing this on an option I saw in the system BIOS. Power Fan Speed was not available for me.

Edit:

There are very few power supplies that allow their fan speed to be controlled by the motherboard, and even fewer that allow software to modify their speed. Even if your power supply is one of these rare beasts, you would not be able to shut off the fan using either of these methods. Even if you were able to shut it off using one of these methods, the fan would still spin up when first started since the system wouldn't have been able to give it the instruction to stop the fan yet.

Quote found here - http://www.daniweb.com/forums/thread36742.html

 

[TorrentG]

Don't blame Windows 7 for bad connections which will cause burnt connectors. The only way for an OS to blow a Power Supply is if the OS has control over your power supply fans. If the power supply fans are not being controlled properly, this will cause overheated components and result in a damaged Power Supply Unit.

+1 Agreed.

 

[sixteen97]

If I were the only one this happened to I would readily agree, but for this to happen to multiple people with power supplies that worked fine until windows 7 was installed, you can't help but be a bit suspicious.