Posted on 11/29/2007 9:09:11 AM PST by edcoil
I got a great deal on an Emachine about 16 months ago, so great one of the guys in my office got one the same day.
He emailed me over the weekend his power supply went out - not normally a big deal, just a simple replacement - the down side is that when this power supply goes, it changes the polarity of the motherboard - so when it goes, the motherboard goes.
He found out from the Geek squad this is becoming a huge problem.
Well, today my son's PS went out taking the motherboard with it so now, it is an expensive repair.
He told me their is a group forming to a class action lawsuit as this seems to be happening all over.
Let me know if this has happened to you.
Couldn't a cheap diode fix that polarity reversal problem?
I havre experienced power supply problems with E-Machines of the 1999/2000 vintage but I never seen the polarity chenge in the motherboards for them.
If you know how to insert one. I would assume it would have been pre-installed.
Not having this type of protection is what males emachines cheeper.
What does this problem have to do with Dell?
My electronics teacher in high school brought us a project — fix his 6-meter marine radio.
The cleaning people had disconnected his battery, and reconnected it backwards. He hadn’t noticed, turned on the radio, and when it didn’t work proceeded to push button after button.
Multiple circuits were fried, which made it a challenging task for us, since we had to work our way through a series of failures.
The first circuit to fry? The diode that was placed across the inputs which was supposed to short the power if it was hooked backwards, blowing the fuse.
Oh for crying out loud ... a class action suit? Sheesh. A replacement power supply can be ordered online and at a reasonable price if you search. Instead of complaining, they should be opening up their own storefront. And I’ll bet most problems could be solved with a replacement of the fan so it might be worthwhile including a pre-paid return label for the old one. It suxor when entrepreneural spirit is replaced by lawyers.
I haven't fooled around with this stuff in a long time, but I think one diode could prevent the damage - and four diodes (aka a bridge rectifier) could allow it to continue operating normally?
I recently lost the PS on our older e-machine. Haven’t had it fixed yet, so I don’t know if the other problem exists or not. Maybe I should look into it.
Please get the title changed if this has nothing to do with Dell.
I would get a second opinion about the motherboard, from an independent pc repair shop. Geek Squad is a part of Best Buy, well known to lie for any reason that will make more cash.
I was trying to figure that out myself?
I have been on e-chat with emachine not for 30 minutes and they have given me a list of things to try to refresh the board, memory, etc. Will try it and let you know if it fixes it.
I never heard of that before.
Join the club. You can hold the power button down for 10 sec to refresh the power cycle, remove memory and try to boot to get the board to issue error codes but having tried all this, its dead. Just don’t know if memory is gone and/or processor until the board gets replaced.
The trouble is that a long time will pass before the customers get anything.
It happened to mine too.
I used to fix PC’s for a living and I’ve seen a great many of times a Faulty power supply to be the cause of many PC mystery problems. we would change the memory, motherboard, processor, various cards only to find out a seemingly working PS being the culprit.
Put in a nice ANTEC 600W when I built my new PC.
Didn’t want to take any chances.
So you replaced the dead power supply and the computer still doesn’t work?
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