The joys of Dell, part 22

"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury)
12/22/2016 at 21:53 • Filed to: None

I recently discovered that my upgraded Optiplex 980 didn’t have the oomph to drive two optical drives, two hard drives and a 9800GT using the stock power supply. A little research showed that I could use a standard ATX power supply, sort of. Dell being Dell, the power supply pinouts don’t conform to the ATX standard, nor do they use a standard ATX connector.

There was an adapter on the power supply and I disconnected all of the wires, using the proper tool, and tried to reconfigure it to work with an off the shelf power supply, but the pins didn’t seem to want to securely seat in the housing. I gave up and ordered a rewired adapter and installed it today. Of course, it didn’t work.

Troubleshooting computers is just like working on a car. Try different parts in different places (or bench test) to find the point of failure. I tried the new power supply in a different computer and it worked. I got the original adapter back together and tested it with the stock power supply and it still booted so I knew that I didn’t kill the computer. I tried a different power supply (good thing I’m a packrat) with the new adapter and it worked! Somehow the power supply I tried to use originally is somehow different enough that it was incompatible with the Dell.

After all of this, the computer is back up and running with all of the drives and no sign of a lack of wattage. I think I can finally call this machine complete, seal up the case and start working on software issues (mouse problem on KVM when switching away and then back - gotta love windoze). And back to an older Dell to figure out why a fresh install of Win7 runs so horribly slow and has booting problems; I suspect it has something to do with my used DVR hard drives, so a full format and testing is in order. Maybe someday I will actually use these computers instead of just tweaking and upgrading, but like we do with our cars, sometimes the tweaking is the fun.

DISCUSSION (8)

Wacko > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
12/22/2016 at 23:26

Did you scan or repair the drives for bad sectors?

And oem power supplies are always the lowest wattage that they could get away with.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > Wacko
12/23/2016 at 00:00

I’ve yanked that drive for now and popped in another one, and the system seems to be running much better now. I’ll run the other one through SpinRite over the weekend and see if it’s salvageable; if not, I’m out another 59 freakin’ cents.

For a system that has room for as many drives and cards as that OptiPlex, they sure ran a low-wattage power supply, and that really doesn’t come as any surprise whatsoever. I don’t understand why the decent Antec power supply I tried didn’t work, but at least I had another 500 watter to toss in to get it running.

Now on to the mouse problem. If I click on a window it doesn’t activate it, but acts as if I’m clicking on another window or the desktop; it essentially makes the front window inactive. If I put the machine to sleep and bring it right back it works normally, but if I switch to another machine and back to the first it goes back to the foreground/background click problem again. I don’t recall having this problem before, and the XP system seems unaffected; only the Win7 and Win10 machines are having issues, and the Win7 box is a completely fresh install. WTF?

facw > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
12/23/2016 at 00:16

Dell has been doing shit with the power supplies forever. I remember 15 years ago they had ATX power supplies, using a connector that looked like an ATX connector but was wired differently for some reason. Would be nice if they didn’t hate standard parts so much.

wiffleballtony > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
12/23/2016 at 00:24

I HATE Dell’s proprietary garbage.

Wacko > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
12/23/2016 at 00:28

I think I had a similar mouse / kvm problem with a certain brand of mice.

For hds I use hdd-regenerator.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > facw
12/23/2016 at 00:31

Same thing on this system - nothing has changed. But I refuse to let their antics beat me, even if it meant spending more for the adapter ($15) than I spent on the computer.

If I could find a decent and affordable LGA1156 motherboard I’d toss the Dell in the scrap pile and just reuse the CPU, RAM and drives.

Nisman > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
12/23/2016 at 10:03

Dude, throw away your optiplex and do a budget build.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > Nisman
12/23/2016 at 12:05

It’s a $15 computer, so this is my budget build... :P